McMullen Museum: Permanent Collection

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Jules Dupré (1811–89)
Landscape with Woman in Red, c. 1880

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.399

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

This bucolic scene of a small remote farmhouse depicts an age-old mode of life far from the increasing urbanization and industrialization of modern Paris. Dupré was a leading artist of the Barbizon school, a group of artists in mid-nineteenth century France who emphasized scenes of nature and rural work to break away from the stilted classicism of academic art. Here he captures the late afternoon light with broad brushstrokes and rich color; his loose and personal style rejected the academic ideal of slick, polished surfaces that still characterized official painting.

Dupré was highly regarded in his lifetime; American collectors vied for his paintings, and fellow landscape painter Camille Corot (1796–1875) called him “the Beethoven of landscape.”

A hint of sunset glow in the distance is typical of his works. The bright, ragged clouds overhead are reflected in the reedy pond below, suggesting a unity of sky and earth. As with earlier Romantic artists, nature is a vehicle for expressing emotion. In the early 1830s Dupré had visited Britain where he admired the works of John Constable (1776–1837). The isolation of the single figure in red evokes the loneliness of rural life, especially for women of the era. A few cattle are the only other living creatures; the shifting drama of light and the changing seasons evoke the inexorable passage of time.

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William Bradford (1823–92)
Coastal Scene with Figures (Grand Manan), 1863

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Tania and Thomas M. Evans Jr. in honor of Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26 for his enduring commitment to the McMullen Museum and the advancement of the study and appreciation of American art, 2019.13

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, is the largest and most remote of the three major islands at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy. The island, which belonged to the United States until traded to the British in 1817, is known for its striking ancient geology. The imposing pyramidal cliffs beside the beach are mirrored in the majestic cloud formations over the sea on the left. A man and woman carry a canoe towards the water, while another figure approaches a boat beached on the sand.

Bradford first traveled to this region between 1854 and 1857, returning often in the 1860s. Bradford Cove, named for the artist, is the only safe anchorage on the west side of the island. Many American artists traveled to remote places to find scenes of unspoiled nature as a refuge from increasing industrialization and the strife of the Civil War. The New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier dedicated a poem to Bradford which makes this explicit with reference to the east winds from Labrador and “The sea-dipped pencil…[which] beguiles my pen away from the sharp strifes and sorrows of today.”¹

William Bradford, Off the Coast of Labrador, 1866. Oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.

While other paintings by Bradford are often highly Romantic, this is a work of quiet realism. Partly due to his Quaker background, as well as the influence of photography and Pre-Raphaelitism, Bradford’s style is clear and simple in its realism. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman observed that “Bradford felt that his own success depended on minute accuracy and patient observation of local characteristics.”² This is echoed in a later painting of a similar scene, Off the Coast of Labrador at the Art Institute of Chicago.

1. The full poem appears in Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists; Preceded by an Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of Art in America (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 556.

2. Tuckerman, 554.

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James Miller
Peaceable Kingdom, n.d.

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2019.1

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

One of Edward Hicks’s many depictions of the “peaceable kingdom,” c. 1833. Oil on canvas, Worcester Art Museum.

The opening third of the Jewish book of Isaiah is believed to have been written in the eighth century BCE. The author, looking beyond his own era of conflict between the Kingdom of Judah and its neighbors, speaks of an era of peace and justice to come when the city of Jerusalem will be under God’s protection and “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them” (11:6). The child in this prophecy was later interpreted by many Christians to describe the incarnate Christ, and the passage became a favorite subject for American artists in the nineteenth century—most famously, Quaker Edward Hicks (1780–1839), who painted the scene, known as the “peaceable kingdom” at least sixty-two times (see image). The painting here is signed on the back by the obscure American artist James Miller. While his dates are unknown, stylistic elements suggest the work is from the mid-nineteenth century. It also seems that Miller spent some time studying European painting, even though his odd sense of scale and eclectic flora reveal a charming naivete.

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael (1483–1520), The Small Cowper Madonna, c. 1505. Oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Jacob van Ruisdael, Winter Landscape with Dead Tree, 1660s. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.

The “little child” is an example of a nineteenth-century idealized portrait—not a likeness of a particular person, but an archetype based on conventional ideas of perfection. Raphael was a favorite model for painters of the era, and this child’s face resembles the Renaissance master’s depictions of putti and especially of the infant Christ (see image). The child’s fanciful garments are more theatrical than historic.

The wonderfully expressive animals are not at all in scale to the central child. The lion is nonetheless anatomically accurate, indicating the painter had a model from which to work. While today lions are native to Sub-Saharan Africa, in ancient times they spread throughout the Middle East and are prominent in Mesopotamian art. The delicate, pear-shaped lamb appears to be a Merino, a breed prized for the softness of its wool, originally from Spain. In the background, another lion socializes with several lambs; these are in correct scale to one another.

The many vegetative elements of the painting are remarkable. The painting’s broad, leafy trees are painted schematically after the style of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European landscape painting—more specifically, after influential Dutch artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–82) (see image). The painterly leaves are unidentifiable, in contrast to the highly detailed and specific plants in the foreground. In the left foreground is the familiar succulent Aloe vera, native to the Arabian Peninsula; in ancient Rome it was a symbol of the divine. By the nineteenth century aloe was cultivated worldwide for its gel’s healing qualities. To the left is a cactus commonly called the prickly pear, symbolic of protection, hope, and endurance. It is native to arid regions of the Americas and here contributes to the work’s eclectic mixture of biomes. Lastly, in front of the lamb is a low grape vine. Grapes and vineyards are symbols throughout the book of Isaiah, for example in its Song of the Vineyard (5:1–7), an allegory about God’s relationship with Judah. For Christians, wine is also one of the two elements of the Eucharist.

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Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850–1921)
SS “Commonwealth,” 1902

Oil on canvas McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Jacqueline McMullen, 2006.4

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Born in Denmark, Antonio Jacobsen settled in 1873 in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Soon after his arrival, he started sketching ships in nearby New York Harbor. Impressed by his precise renderings, owners and captains began commissioning him to paint “portraits” of their ships docked in the harbor. As his reputation grew, Jacobsen completed more than six thousand paintings that document the increasing size and gradual transition of merchant sailing ships into steamers. John McMullen (1918–2005), benefactor with his wife Jacqueline of this Museum, was a naval engineer and the owner of Norton Lilly, a leading ship agency company and operator of merchant navy ships. He assembled one of the largest private collections of Jacobsen’s paintings, to this work and the nearby SS “Glenogle” belonged.

The SS Commonwealth was built for the Dominion Line in 1900 by Harland and Wolff in Belfast to carry passengers, including many immigrants in steerage, between Liverpool and Boston in seven days. The passenger liner for 1,300 boasted luxurious first-class accommodations. Jacobsen paints the steamer flying the American flag, the British Red Ensign, and the Dominion Line pennant.

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Jasmin Joseph (1923–2005)
Landscape with Gourds, c. 1965–75

Oil on beaverboard
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Transferred from Pine Manor College, 2022.70

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Born into poverty in Grande-Riviere-du-Nord, Haiti, Jasmin Joseph was working in a brick factory when he began carving terracotta sculptures. He used the first proceeds from sales of his sculptures to become literate. By 1950, Joseph had converted from Voduo to Protestantism, become a lay priest, and abandoned sculpture for painting. The McMullen’s work comes from a series begun in the 1960s depicting brightly colored fruit bearing trees growing in a barren landscape. He titled several of these paintings, some with figures, Tree of Life (see images).

Left: Untitled, 1960s. Oil on board, private collection. Right: Tree of Life #2, 1966. Oil on board, Myriam Nader Haitian Art.

In the present painting Joseph fills the frame with a calabash tree, a tropical plant common in Haiti that produces large, round green gourds that become increasingly yellow orange as they ripen. He adds two women in traditional rural dress with headwraps. One, resting on the ground, looks up at the tree. The other, dwarfed by the vast tree, stands on one of its branches while harvesting.

Within Haitian culture calabash trees, called kalbas kouran (“running calabash”) and their fruit are highly valued. The gourds’ hard outer shells are dried, hollowed, carved, and decorated by craftspeople for use as utensils, bowls, decorations, masks, and even musical instruments like maracas and the sacred rattle, asson, emblematic of the Voduo priesthood.

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Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850–1921)
SS “Glenogle,” 1884

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Jacqueline McMullen, 2006.3

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Born in Denmark, Antonio Jacobsen settled in 1873 in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Soon after his arrival, he started sketching ships in nearby New York Harbor. Impressed by his precise renderings, owners and captains began commissioning him to paint “portraits” of their ships docked in the harbor. As his reputation grew, Jacobsen completed more than six thousand paintings that document the increasing size and gradual transition of merchant sailing ships into steamers. John McMullen (1918–2005), benefactor with his wife Jacqueline of this Museum, was a naval engineer and the owner of Norton Lilly, a leading ship agency company and operator of merchant navy ships. He assembled one of the largest private collections of Jacobsen’s paintings, to which this work and the nearby SS “Commonwealth” belonged.

The British steamer Glenogle was built in 1882 by London & Glasgow Co. for the Glen Line based in Glasgow. Jacobsen depicts it on one of its early voyages with auxiliary sails set and flying the Union Jack and the British Red Ensign. Sold to Lim Chin Tsang of Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar), the passenger/cargo ship remained in commission until 1919 when it wrecked at Syriam Flats while transporting rice from Rangoon to Calcutta.

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John Wollaston (1710–75)
Portrait of a Boy, 1750s

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Will J. Lessard, 1988.177

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Portrait of William Holmes, c. 1765–67. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Portrait of Ryland Randolph, c. 1755–58. Oil on canvas, Wilton House Museum, Richmond.

Born and trained as a portrait painter in London, Wollaston moved in 1749 to New York, and subsequently to Philadelphia, Annapolis, Virginia, and Charleston where he painted nearly three hundred portraits of newly landed gentry and merchants in the then-fashionable English rococo style. His portraits, often unsigned, constitute a visual chronicle of nearly every influential aristocrat in colonial America at the time. Before he returned to London in 1767, Wollaston’s nimble poses, sumptuous fabrics, and pastel colors had influenced American portrait painters, including Robert Feke and Benjamin West.

Wollaston completed several portraits of the young scions of America’s leading families. Like the present sitter and William Holmes (see image) his well-born boys show off their family’s newly established prosperity in the colony. Often depicted with their hunting dog against the landscape of their family estate, they are dressed formally as adults in breeches, shirts with tight collars and flared sleeves, and finely executed silk waistcoats and jackets. With his body turned slightly to the left, his head in the opposite direction to engage the viewer, and his right hand on his hip, the present boy assumes the same posture as many of Wollaston’s standing men, like Ryland Randolph (see image).

This painting came to Boston College with a plaque on its frame attributing it to the Scottish artist John Smibert and identifying the sitter as the young George Berkeley (1685–1753), who became a distinguished philosopher and Anglo-Irish Bishop. Between 1728 and 1732 Bishop Berkeley moved from Ireland to Middletown, Rhode Island, where he became a plantation owner and enslaver He brought with him to Rhode Island John Smibert (1666–1751), whom he met for the first time in Italy in 1719–20, long after Berkeley would have been the age of the boy in the portrait. Thus, the frame’s plaque probably reflects a mendacious dealer’s attempt to enhance the painting’s appeal to an Irish-American buyer and, moreover, explains why it might have been given to Boston College.

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John La Farge (1835–1910)
Windmill (Newport, Windmill, near Easton’s Pond. Early Spring, Southeast Wind), 1864

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Christian Vareika ’09 and Hope Vareika ’15, 2018.67

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Windmills at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876.

Contrasts of pre-industrial life with new technologies of the nineteenth century were particularly evident in New England. An important source of power for the early growth of the regional economy, windmills by mid-century had become museum artifacts. In Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the windmill was relegated to a historic display in the Agricultural Hall (see image). In the next building, visitors could see the future of industrial power: a colossal two-cylinder steam engine built in Providence capable of generating the astonishing power of 140 horses (see image).

La Farge’s friend, Henry Adams, found a new metaphor for the divine in the technology displayed at the Centennial Exhibition. In a later essay titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin” he contrasts the Middle Ages with the modern world, writing: “The dynamo became a symbol of infinity … [and] he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The traditional windmill, emblematic of natural power, was eclipsed by the new technologies.

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John La Farge (1835–1910)
The Virgin at the Foot of the Cross, 1862–63

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of William M. & Alison S. Vareika ’74, P’09, ’15, LP’16 and Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2016.830.1

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

This large panel depicting the Virgin was paired with the painting of St. John the Evangelist as part of a project for an unfinished triptych. In 1878 La Farge expressed his intentions in notes for an auction of the works: “These panels are treated as part of a great decorative ‘ensemble.’ … The figures of John and Mary represent them as listening to words [John 19:25–27]. They are also meant to typify Humanity and the Church.” Mary is modeled on La Farge’s wife, Margaret.

The Virgin and St. John were exhibited in 1863 at the National Academy of Design in New York, and featured in 1878 in the exhibition and sale of La Farge’s works in Boston. In 1901 William C. Whitney installed the panels with other paintings and tapestries on the grand staircase of his mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where they remained until 1931 when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney donated them to the new Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1950, the museum sold the panels to Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, who hung them in his home in Trujillo, Spain. Cornelius Whitney’s decorator, Duarte Pinto Coelho, owned them from 1983 until 2010 when William Vareika discovered them in a Christie’s auction in England.

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George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925)
Old Lady with Blue Book, 1919

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2019.4

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

George Bellows is most famous for his paintings of urban New York, particularly scenes of boxing and nightlife. A student of Robert Henri (1865–1929), Bellows is associated with the so-called Ashcan School, a group composed of Henri and his followers committed to depicting realistic scenes of poor neighborhoods and their inhabitants. Although Bellows shared some of the subject matter and broad painterly style of his fellow painters in the Ashcan group, he was less interested in painting as social commentary than he was in the freedom of artists to paint whatever they wanted. Bellows’s work flitted from city scenes to those of high society to seascapes; and from periodical illustration to portraiture.

George Wesley Bellows, My Mother, 1921. Oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.

Thomas Eakins, Miss Amelia Van Buren, c. 1891. Oil on canvas, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

His title for Old Lady with Blue Book does not provide the name of the sitter, but she closely resembles Bellows’s mother as he depicted her in other works (see comparison). That the McMullen painting was in Bellows’s estate at his death suggests it was of personal significance. Stylistically, the loose brushwork shows the strong influence of Henri, while the dark, restrained palette and matter-of-fact realism recalls the work of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), whom Bellows held in high esteem (see comparison).

The black dress with white lace collar and cuffs indicates the wearer is in either “second mourning” or “late mourning.” Complex rules dictated mourning attire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and changed with the passage of time from the death of a loved one. Some widows, especially the elderly, wore late mourning clothes the rest of their lives. The other indication that this woman is a widow is her brooch bearing the likeness of a man. While the early Victorian tradition was for mourning brooches to feature locks of hair or cameos of mourning figures, by the late nineteenth century photographs of the deceased, sometimes colored, were popular. By the early twentieth century, these markers of widowhood would have been recognized by viewers even if they were fading from practice. The blue book is a sewn cloth hardcover with gold blocking (embossed printing) on its spine. The electric blue is probably due to aniline, a petroleum dye discovered in 1856 that produces dazzling colors, including a bright indigo. Such colors were common in cloth bindings of the 1860s, but soon went out of fashion as later covers incorporated more overall printing and muted colors. Gold blocking was also popular in the years following the 1849 gold rush, but fell out of style after the Civil War drove up the cost. Taken together, these clues point to the book being an antique, and possibly a treasure for its owner.

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Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98)
The Annunciation, c. 1885

Bodycolor over pen and brown ink, with silver and gold paint with white heightening, on composition board
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael Altman P’22, ’24, ’26 in memory of Father Michael J. Himes

Diana Larsen
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

Top: Interior of San Paolo dentro le Mura showing the Annunciation mosaic over the first arch.
Bottom: Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Pelican in Her Piety, 1880. Colored chalks and gold on paper, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow.

Often referred to as the “last pre-Raphaelite,” British artist Edward Coley Burne-Jones was both an accomplished painter and decorative designer. Frequently collaborating with his lifelong friend, William Morris (1834–96), he created designs for stained glass, textiles, and other furnishings. The Annunciation is a finished study for part of a cycle of mosaics commissioned for the American Episcopalian church in Rome, San Paolo dentro le Mura (St. Paul’s within the Walls, completed in 1880 (see photo), designed by British architect George Edmund Street (1824–81).

Inspired by sixth-century church mosaics the artist saw in Ravenna on his 1871 trip to Italy with the English critic and painter, John Ruskin, Burne-Jones’s mosaics designed for the Roman church decorate the chancel arches, the choir, and the apse. Their iconography progresses chronologically through the space: in the first arch the Annunciation, in the second Christ with arms outstretched in front of the Tree of Forgiveness flanked by Adam and Eve, and in the apse Christ in Glory with angels.

Burne-Jones sets The Annunciation in a mountainous desert under a reddening sky, a reference to the Marian prayer, the Angelus. Mary encounters the Archangel Gabriel while drawing water (suggested by the urn) from a spring. On the left, he includes a pelican piercing her breast to feed her young with her blood—a medieval symbol of Christ’s sacrifice not commonly depicted in Annunciation scenes. Burne-Jones was attracted to the pelican symbolism, including it in his 1880 design for a stained glass window in St. Martin’s Church, Brampton, Cumbria (see image). Burne-Jones separates Mary and the angel to accommodate the shape of the neo-Gothic arch. He adds Latin inscriptions referring to Mary in the lower corners in the study; they appear in the arch in the mosaic.

Throughout his life Burne-Jones painted many versions of the Annunciation. The elongated annunciating angel here is a departure from his earlier lifelike angels. A stylized figure with gold highlights in his hair and heart-shaped wings hovers and heralds the advent of symbolism in art—where spirituality and mysticism prevail. Burne-Jones became especially popular with French symbolists, who discovered his work at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

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Eastman Johnson (1824–1906)
Mother and Child: The Reading Lesson, 1870

Oil on board
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of James E. Sowell in honor of Boston College parent Michael N. Altman for his enduring commitment to the McMullen Museum and the advancement of the study and appreciation of American art, 2021.8

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

The Little Convalescent, c. 1873–79. Oil on paperboard, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Scenes of children reading both alone and with their mothers were Eastman Johnson’s major subjects in the 1870s, soon after Johnson had fathered his only child. He often used his sister and her children as models for these domestic tableaux, as in his The Little Convalescent (see comparison). In the Victorian era, middle- and upper-class families saw childhood as a state of innocence and grace, and education was a moral imperative for development. This painting depicts both a sacred and fleeting moment of youth and preparation for adulthood to come. The white dresses of mother and child are also symbols of purity.

Johnson was known for his genre paintings—scenes depicting aspects of everyday life. His career began as an apprentice to Boston lithographer J. H. Bufford, whose shop’s output included book illustrations, popular reproductions, and mechanical diagrams. Johnson’s mature paintings reflect something of this prosaic, literal approach to subjects, but coupled with a cosmopolitan, academic style.

Like many American artists of the nineteenth century, Johnson traveled to Europe for his instruction. In his case, this took him to the Düsseldorf Academy, which under the direction of Wilhelm von Schadow popularized German Romanticism, and later to The Hague, where he studied seventeenth-century Dutch masters. His internalization of a naturalistic style, soft brushwork, and a subdued palette (as seen here) led to his moniker “the American Rembrandt.”

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Eastman Johnson (1824–1906)
Woman Playing a Harp, c. 1885

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2021.1

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

The 1907 estate sale in which this painting was auctioned provides this description: “A young lady, dressed in a short-sleeved Empire gown of ecru satin, sits playing a large harp, which is partly gilded and partly painted red. The light falls upon her outstretched left hand and the lower part of her figure. The head and shoulders are in luminous shadow. In the background is suggested the interior of a room panelled in mahogany.”¹ This painting puts us in the point of view of a houseguest being entertained in a rich parlor; the young woman is not a concert musician but a lady of society performing as a host.

Young upper-class women of the nineteenth century were expected to prepare themselves for society life and marriage through a refinement of manners and culture that typically included developing themselves musically. Pianos and harps were the most common instruments for women’s instruction, allowing one to sing while playing. The harp was associated with antiquity, as the instrument developed from the lyre used in classical Greece; a connection emphasized here by the fluting of the harp’s pillar to resemble a Doric column. Johnson has carefully depicted the player’s technique: the woman is using the traditional French method of playing, in which the forearms rest on the sides of the soundboard and the right arm supports the instrument’s weight. This produces a softer sound than the twentieth-century Salzedo method, now largely used in an orchestral setting, in which the arms are held horizontally, away from the harp.

1 Quoted in Patricia Hills, ed., Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonée, https://www.eastmanjohnson.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=337.

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Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930)
The Oyster Eaters, 1903

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2021.2

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

“Genre painting” is the term given to paintings of unnamed, ordinary people engaged in quotidian scenes of labor or leisure, as opposed to depicting famous persons engaged in historic events. Emerging from Dutch and Flemish traditions in the seventeenth century, by the nineteenth and early twentieth century genre painting was well-represented in America, where scenes of common life often focused on working-class or even impoverished subjects. The Oyster Eaters has as an alternative title Bums Drinking, underscoring the rough appearance and sooty hands of the two characters, who appear both to raise a toast and offer a seat to the viewer.

The Apprentice, 1907. Oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.

The Red Bow, 1902. Oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum.

While oysters had long been a luxury food served as a delicacy, by the latter half of the nineteenth century American oyster production had surged enough for oysters to sell one for a penny, making them a popular source of protein for the working class. Oyster houses, also called oyster saloons, served the shellfish with beer and wine, particularly at the lunch hour. The simple presentation of the raw food underscores the men’s modest means, as does the beer they drink. Beer had only recently become a staple for the masses, following advancements in production and the introduction of pasteurization. The increased access to cheap alcohol also fueled a resurgence of temperance movements. The Anti-Saloon League brought pressure on local legislatures to close bars. Waves of German immigration in the nineteenth century gave rise to xenophobia, and many saw beer as a marker of German culture to be avoided. Thus, Hawthorne’s subject carries political as well as class significance.

While his paintings’ subject matter was often drawn from the streets, Hawthorne’s work was not spontaneous; instead he carefully staged his compositions with models and props. The covered pewter tankard held open by one of the men here appears identical to the one held by his Apprentice of four years later, and may in fact be the same vessel (see image).

In addition to his genre paintings Hawthore painted scenes of high society, especially of elegant women in opulent settings (see image). He founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899, the first outdoor school for figure painting in America. Notable students of Hawthorne were John Noble, Richard Miller, Max Bohm, and Norman Rockwell, whose work can also be seen as a continuation of the genre painting tradition.

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William Morris Hunt (1824–79)
Woman Knitting and Cow (Fontainebleau), 1860

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2022.87

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies of the Village, 1851. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This small painting of a woman knitting while standing beside her cow continues the tradition of painting rural residents Hunt began in France near Fontainebleau. The area was popularized as an artist’s colony by Jean-François Millet (1814–75), Gustave Courbet (1819–77), and other realist artists belonging to the Barbizon school. Hunt’s barefoot cowherd recalls the young cowherd seen receiving alms from Courbet’s sisters in his Young Ladies of the Village (1851, see image). Rural peasants needed to be productive at all times if they were to survive; she cannot stand idle while guarding the cow. Both artists understood the real lives of the rural poor.

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In 1846, following studies at several European institutions, American artist William Morris Hunt moved to Paris to be taught by the history painter Thomas Couture (1815–79). This was during the rise of the French realist movement, whose proponents challenged established ideas of what were proper subjects for art by depicting ordinary scenes of ordinary people. At the 1851 Salon, Hunt first encountered the work of realist painter Jean-François Millet (1814–75) through what would become the artist’s most famous work, The Sower (1850, see image). Hunt was so inspired by the painting of peasant labor that he bought the painting and became both a friend and pupil of Millet’s.

In the following years Hunt accompanied Millet to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau region, famous as the birthplace of the Barbizon school, a realist movement primarily dedicated to landscape. Millet is considered a member of this group, although his interest in the region was in its agrarian residents. Hunt, too, dedicated himself to scenes of peasant life. It was perhaps during this time that Hunt observed and sketched the subject for Woman Knitting and Cow; the painting itself was not finished until 1860, five years after Hunt’s return to America.

Girl with Cows, 1860. Oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The work’s loose lines and limited palette suggest that this was a preliminary sketch; the woman and cow are the same as in Hunt’s larger, more finished Girl with Cows (1860, see image), which also includes a second cow and different trees in the background. The present version, however, features a tilling peasant in the top left distance that the other painting does not.

Hunt’s painting shows the clear influence of Millet, who depicted scenes from peasant life with frankness and dignity. Hunt likewise paints this young woman in a pose of stately grace, even given her bare feet and her toil, industriously knitting while simultaneously tending her cow. Stylistically Hunt and Millet use a similar combination of crisp contour lines and broad, painterly fields of color. While Millet was considered a realist, his peasants often had heroic or monumental poses and physiques; Hunt’s approach is softer, more contemplative, a moment of relative repose for the laborer.

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William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)
Autumn Still Life, c. 1906

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2022.113

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

The genre of still life—paintings depicting flowers, fruits, vessels, and other arranged, inanimate objects—became codified in Dutch painting in the sixteenth century. Through the domestic subject matter, an artist expressed ideals of abundance and taste, and sometimes allegorical meaning. A popular form for collectors, it was not granted much esteem. The Académie de peinture et de sculpture, which since its founding in 1648 dictated artistic taste and style through much of Europe, ranked still life as the lowest form of painting. But the genre’s reputation changed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when impressionist and post-impressionist painters, interested primarily in capturing the psychology of vision, painted commonplace bourgeois scenes. For these painters, still life was an equally appropriate form as any other.

William Merritt Chase is widely credited for bringing impressionism to America. He shared with the movement’s other artists not only a painterly, light-focused style, but also an egalitarian approach to subject matter. The fruits of Autumn Still Life were chosen as an opportunity to employ lush colors and broad strokes on a large canvas. While this is not an allegorical painting, Chase’s choice of subjects—pumpkins, pomegranates, and what appears to be a parsnip and a dark bell pepper—is still full of meaning.

Fruit and Porcelain, 1908. Oil on canvas, private collection.

Pumpkins, while cultivated globally, are native to the Americas and strongly associated with the harvest season, as they only reach maturity in fall. Pumpkins must be cooked to be edible, but here Chase presents raw wedges, drawn perhaps to the lattice of strands and seeds that make up the core of the fruit and are suited to his loose and expressive brushwork.

Pomegranates also indicate the change of seasons. The fruit features in the myth of Hades, Persephone, and Demeter: its characteristic arils play a decisive role in the story of how autumn and winter came to be. Their cultivation is an inversion of the pumpkins, as pomegranates, while grown worldwide, are native to the Mediterranean. Chase himself was from the American Midwest but his career brought him to study in the artistic centers of Europe. His choice of objects reflects his cosmopolitan orientation. Chase traveled to Venice in 1877 and eventually purchased a villa outside of Florence in 1910, located next to a grove of pomegranates. He painted the fruit on many occasions (see image).

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Giovanni Battista Salvi (Sassoferrato) (1609–85)
Madonna of the Cherubs, c. 1650

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.72

Stephanie C. Leone
Professor, Art History

Framed by the cherubic messengers and the golden light of heaven, the Virgin Mary gracefully shifts her shoulders and lifts her head, eyes, and—we sense—mind to God. The rotation is stilled by her praying hands that gently stabilize her figure and crystalize her complete devotion. The brushstrokes of oil paint are applied smoothly to form the perfect contours of her face, and earth pigments are blended into her creamy-rosy complexion to depict soft shadows. The texture of the drapery is slightly rougher, hinting at the material world. Mary is at once corporeal and ethereal, the perfect embodiment of the union between the sacred and the earthly in the mother of God.

Born in the rural region of the Marche, northeast of Rome, Giovanni Battista Salvi, known as Sassoferrato after his hometown, was out of step with the exuberant baroque art of his time, but his paintings tell us much about Catholic devotional culture. He formulated a unique style through studying the Renaissance painters, Perugino, Andrea del Sarto, and especially Raphael, and classically minded seventeenth-century painters, such as Domenichino and Guido Reni, but restrained their palettes, compositions, and sense of energy. Sassoferrato dedicated himself to making images of the Virgin Mary. He developed a handful of types and repeated the compositions with small variations. At the time of his death, his inventory recorded 105 paintings in his possession, of which seventy were Madonna images.¹

Guido Reni (1575–1642), The Immaculate Conception, 1627. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

As a Boston College undergraduate, Christine Papastamelos ’14, interpreted Sassoferrato’s Madonna of the Cherubs in the context of the Catholic Reformation: “The image of Mary as heaven bound and without child epitomizes the [Catholic] Marian theological position of the seventeenth century.” The painting celebrates Mary’s essential role in salvation and the grace that God uniquely bestowed upon her. Sassoferrato’s Madonna of the Cherubs is a short-hand version of the iconography of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that the Virgin Mary was exempt from original sin. Due to its size, the painting most likely functioned as a devotional work in a private setting, in comparison to Reni’s full length Conception (see image) that codified this iconography.

Sassoferrato’s Madonnas appealed to the Catholic faithful during his own day as well as succeeding centuries, with numerous popes prizing his paintings. Pius VII (1800–23) had a print made of his Madonna in Prayer to disseminate the image widely. The provenance of Boston College’s painting is unknown until 1947 when it was recorded in a photograph of Bapst Library.

Praying hands were a key motif for Sassoferrato, and the McMullen Museum owns his drawing of this theme.

1. Patrizia Cavazzini, “L’inventario della morte di Sassoferrato e il problema delle copie,” in Sassoferrato, Pictor Virginum: Nuovi studi e documenti per Giovan Battista Salvi, ed. Cecilia Prete (Ancona: Il lavoro editoriale, Istituto Internazionale di Studi Piceni, 2009), 56–69.

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After Annibale Carracci (1560–1609)
Holy Family (Montalto Madonna), n.d.

Oil on canvas mounted on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.85

Stephanie C. Leone
Professor, Art History

Annibale Carracci, Montalto Madonna (Holy Family with Infant John the Baptist), c. 1598–1600. Oil on copper, National Gallery, London.

Cornelis Bloemaert (1603–92), after Annibale Carracci, Montalto Madonna, late 1630s. Engraving, British Museum, London.

The Holy Family is a reverse copy of a detail of Annibale Carracci’s famous Montalto Madonna, c. 1598–1600, now in the National Gallery, London¹ (see image). Though small and partial, the painting tells the story of Italian art from the High Renaissance in the sixteenth century to the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, as well as the enduring appeal of this classical art tradition in nineteenth-century Boston.

In The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects of 1672, Giovan Pietro Bellori extolled Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) as the painter who restored Italian art to the ideal, harmonious style established by the celebrated Raphael (1483–1520), and he praised the beauty of Carracci’s Holy Family, made for Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto. The so-called Montalto Madonna represents the robust yet elegant figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, engaged physically and psychologically with the young John the Baptist on the left and Joseph on the right. Grounded in a monumental interior set against a naturalistic landscape, this interconnected and balanced figural group is the perfect blend of earthly domesticity and heavenly grace.

As an undergraduate at Boston College, Dr. Annie McEwen Maloney ’14 argued that this type of painting was prized by eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, educated Northern European travelers schooled in ancient history, literature, and art who were eager to see Renaissance art. Because original Raphael and Carracci paintings were rarely for sale, as Bellori said, “this little picture was copied continuously while it was in the Villa Montalto in Rome, it was already being worn away in the hands of copyists.”² The McMullen copy could have been made to satisfy the demand for this renowned image. But it was not made directly from the original because the dimensions and colors differ and the composition is reversed. Instead, it might have been made from the engraving by Cornelis Bloemaert (see image).

McEwan’s research determined that unlike the original Montalto Madonna, which was eventually acquired by Sir Archibald Campbell of Succoth, Scotland, the McMullen Holy Family was not purchased by an English Grand Tourist. Instead, Isabella Curtis of Boston (1832–1915) bought the painting in Siena during her Grand Tour in the nineteenth century. In 1912, Isabella and her sister Mary gave the Holy Family to Mary Jane Regan (1842–1925), librarian of the Boston Athenæum. A devout Irish Catholic immigrant, Regan must have considered Boston College an appropriate home for the Holy Family, which she presumably donated to the University by 1933.³

1. Larry Keith, “Annibale Carracci’s Montalto Madonna,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 29 (2008): 46–59.

2. Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. H. Wohl and T. Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101.

3. Eileen Lyons, “Mary Jane Regan,” Eire Society of Boston Bulletin 41 (1982): 1–4.

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Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931)
In the Garden, c. 1900

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Jane Frances Welch Cronin and Daniel A. Cronin Jr., 2018.76

Diana Larsen
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

Top: Monet in his garden at Giverny, 1921.
Center: Model posed in the garden of the Hales’ house in Dedham, 1914.
Bottom: Edmund C. Tarbell, The Blue Veil, 1898. Oil on canvas, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Hale was an influential art teacher, writer, and critic as well as a leading painter of the Boston school, along with his teachers at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938) and Frank Weston Benson (1862–1951).

Like many of his contemporaries, Hale went to Paris in 1887–92 to further his academic training at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During that time, Hale spent many summers at Giverny in rural Normandy with his friend and fellow artist, Theodore Earl Butler, son-in-law of impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926), who lived nearby. In the Garden exhibits the plein air subject, bright light, and broken brushwork of French impressionism, especially popular with Boston collectors in the late nineteenth century and exemplifies the growing popularity of gardening as a middle-class leisure pursuit at the turn of the twentieth century. Industrialization had given rise to this suburban hobby as an antidote to city life. Replacing the formality of Gilded Age gardens, the American Colonial Revival, or wild, garden became all the rage. In the Garden is likely set in the Hales’ garden in the Boston suburb of Dedham. A photograph set there (see image), shows the same urn depicted in the present painting. With his free brushwork and soft color palette, Hale captures the summer sunshine bathing the wildflowers that glints off the woman’s translucent veil over her hat. Tarbell’s The Blue Veil (see image) shows a woman in a similar fashionable head covering. In Hale’s painting, the shadow cast by the woman’s swishing skirt, her shaded face, and hand gesture create a transitory pose suggesting she has suddenly become aware of the viewer.

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William Lamb Picknell (1853–97)
Le déclin du jour (Fort Carré, Antibes, France), c. 1895

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2019.3

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Washed in the warm light of the setting sun, the massive sixteenth-century Fort Carré at Antibes rises above the harbor. The sky is clear, and the calm surface of the water creates the effect of a frozen moment. At right, a lighthouse beckons to sailors, a gentle counterpoint to the ancient defensive fortress. Both structures offer shelter and protection.

New England artist William Lamb Picknell lived near the forest of Fontainebleau (southeast of Paris) in the 1890s, but spent winters in the south of France. He exhibited Le déclin du jour at the Paris Salon of 1895. Picknell was related to the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the brilliant light of his painting is related to both Transcendentalism and the artistic style of luminism. The bright high-key effect of his paintings was called the “glare aesthetic” by the art historian William Gerdts to distinguish it from impressionism. The clarity of Picknell’s images radiates a serene contemplation of nature and the works of humans, a paradigm of enlightenment.

Picknell had studied with George Inness in Rome, and like the Swedenborgian artist found a spiritual connection to nature, which he expressed through painting. His cousin and close friend, Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son), said of Picknell: “Art to him was holy.”

Esteemed during his brief life, Picknell was overshadowed in the twentieth century by artists such as Picasso and Matisse who also painted scenes of Antibes in more radical styles. His reputation has been rising again, as alternatives to modernism are being reevaluated.

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Giambettino or Giuseppe (Fra Felice) Cignaroli
Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, 1750–1800

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.30

Stephanie C. Leone
Professor, Art History

Raphael, Madonna of the Chair, 1513–14. Oil on wood, framed, Galleria Palatina, Florence.

Detail of signature on Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist (enhanced for contrast).

In 1866, this painting of the seated Madonna holding the Christ Child, with a young John the Baptist, was sold as an authentic work of Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483–1520) to wealthy Bostonian Peter Chardon Brooks (1830–1920). Although competently painted in a naturalistic style, the painting lacks the insistently tangible figures, confident brushstrokes, and saturated palette of a Raphael painting. The painting is an inventive reinterpretation of Raphael’s famous Madonna of the Chair by either Giambettino (1706–70) or Giuseppe (1727–96) Cignaroli, from Verona, Italy. In creating a devotional picture or a collector’s item, Cignaroli was following the time-honored practice of learning through emulation. He had no intention of passing off his Madonna as a Raphael.

How do we explain its mistaken attribution? At an unknown moment, the size of the original canvas was altered, possibly to fit the painting into the frame that is a near replica of the frame of Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair (1513–14, see image). The frame hides Cignaroli’s signature just below the arm of the chair (see image). In 1866, when Brooks bought the painting, Bostonians lacked the visual resources to authenticate a painting attributed to the master. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, the situation had changed dramatically. Along with the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts and the reproducibility of photography, Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired the first authentic paintings by Raphael in the US, the Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami (c. 1515–16) and the Pietà predella (c. 1503–05) respectively in 1898 and 1900. By 1898 Brooks knew that his painting was not an original Raphael. In 1939 Brooks’s daughter gifted it to a Catholic priest in Chestnut Hill, who, in turn, must have given it to Boston College.¹

1. Stephanie C. Leone, “A ‘Raphael’ in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Biography of the McMullen Museum of Art’s Madonna and Child with John the Baptist,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (2018).

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Unknown artist (Emilian school)
Holy Family with St. John, mid- to late 16th century

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.60

Stephanie C. Leone
Professor, Art History

Parmigianino, The Holy Family with Angels, c. 1524. Oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Parmigianino, The Madonna and Child, c. 1527–30. Oil on panel, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

First documented in 1933 in Bapst Library at Boston College, this graceful yet sturdy Madonna presents her child with an air of knowing confidence while he sits upright, ever so slightly springing forward, to bless the viewer. Mother and child are interrelated, yet autonomous, figures, connected by a deep human bond but aware of their sacred mission. Together, they foretell the future of the Christ Child, the Savior. The quasi-iconic central figures are offset by the diagonal placement of the elderly Joseph in the upper right corner and the infant John the Baptist at lower left, who dynamically leans forward to witness the Savior. The universal Catholic subject and the small dimensions indicate that the painting functioned as a private devotional work. The idealized beauty of the Madonna symbolizes her inner, spiritual grace.

The refinement of the poses, the physiognomies of small, elongated features, the preciosity of details, such as the tight curls of John the Baptist’s hair, and the complex coloristic effects in the draperies and the sky, recall the work of Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, 1503–40). Trained by his printmaking family in Parma, in the Emilian region of northern Italy, Parmigianino displayed a precocious talent for painting. In 1524, the young artist moved to Rome, where he sought to become a new Raphael, the great Renaissance painter who had died four years earlier. To win the patronage of Pope Clement VII, Parmigianino brought with him his first mature work, the Holy Family with Angels, c. 1524, now in the Museo del Prado (see image). In Rome, he made devotional paintings that combine the lessons of Raphael as well as Leonardo and Michelangelo, with his distinctive idealism and elegance known as mannerism, as seen in the Madonna and Child, c. 1527–30, in the Kimbell Art Museum (see image).

Despite the affinities of style between the McMullen Holy Family and these paintings, differences in the handling of the paint suggest that this painting is not by the hand of Parmigianino but rather an as-yet unidentified painter of the Emilian school following the master.

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Orazio de Ferrari (1606–57)
Woman Taken in Adultery, c. 1639

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.168

Stephanie C. Leone
Professor, Art History

Guido Reni, Saint Peter, c. 1633–34. Oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid i di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.

Ecce Homo, 1638. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

Christ and the Adulteress, 1650. Oil on canvas, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.

Nothing is known about Woman Taken in Adultery prior to its display in Boston College’s Bapst Library in 1950, but its attribution to Orazio de Ferrari places it in the prosperous, mercantile, and international republic of Genoa, the first city in Italy to release its painters from guild membership. All of these characteristics fostered the city’s vibrant and pluralistic artistic culture.¹ Orazio’s style draws upon that of his master Giovan Andrea Ansaldo (Voltri, 1584–1638), Flemish artists in Genoa like Anthony Van Dyck, Genoese painters Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari (1598–1669), and Gioacchino Assereto (1600–49), and painters from other Italian schools. Despite this eclecticism, Orazio’s works are united by his commitment to naturalism.²

In Woman Taken in Adultery the artist’s observational tendency exemplified in the face of Christ and the head of the Pharisee is filtered through the lens of Guido Reni (Bologna, 1575–1642, see image). The elegant drapery of the adulteress reflects Ansaldo’s influence. These influences, along with the frontal composition, restrained postures, and limited spatial setting, suggest a work belonging to Orazio’s early phase (prior to 1639), exemplified by his Ecce Homo (see image).

Lacking the drama and spatial complexity of Orazio’s later works, the painting depicts a poignant scene of the Pharisee presenting the adulteress to Jesus (John 8:2–11). Rather than condemn the woman as expected, Jesus replied, “That one of you who is faultless shall throw the first stone,” and subsequently forgave her. Sin and forgiveness were central themes of seventeenth-century Catholic spirituality, and paintings like this one presented exemplars to inspire viewers to repent and seek the transformative power of God’s grace.³ Here the raking light moves from Jesus, across the face of the baffled Pharisee, to the adulteress, whose closed eyes and quiet gesture signify her imminent spiritual freedom. The horizontal format and the quotidian presentation of a Biblical scene are consistent with pictures intended to be hung in a palace, a destiny confirmed by the work’s elaborate, hand-carved frame. Orazio’s full-length version of the Biblical scene in Palazzo Bianco, Genoa (see image), suggests the success of this subject. In baroque Genoa, patrons competitively displayed art in their sumptuous homes to flaunt their wealth and status.

1. Jonathan Bober, Piero Boccardo, and Franco Boggero, eds., Superbarocco: arte a Genova da Rubens a Magnasco (Milan: Skira, 2021).

2. Franco Renzo Pesenti, La pittura in Liguria: artisti del primo seicento (Genoa: Cassa di risparmio di Genova, 1986), 433–87.

3. Thomas Worcester, “Trent and Beyond: Arts of Transformation,” in Saints & Sinners: Caravaggio & the Baroque Image, ed. Franco Mormando (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1999), 87–106.

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McMullen Museum
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Marco Benefial (1684–1764)
Stoning of St. Stephen, c. 1730

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.29

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Marco Benefial, St. Stephen Working Miracles, 1725–27. Oil on canvas, Museo Civico, Diocese of Viterbo.

The painting depicts the story of the first Christian martyr, Stephen (c. 5–34 CE), as told in the Acts of the Apostles 6:8–7:60. A deacon of the early Church in Jerusalem, Stephen was accused of blasphemy and stoned to death. Succumbing to his fate in front of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate in the background, Stephen occupies the central position in the painting. He looks up at his primary executioner, Saul (who later became the Apostle Paul) seemingly pleading for mercy. Illustrating Stephen’s vision as described in the biblical account, God the Father and Christ “at his right hand” attended by two cherubs each holding a symbol of Stephen’s martyrdom (a crown and palm frond) appear above. Animated figures in a variety of poses as well as soldiers on horseback observe the brutal stoning. The complexity of the composition in a painting of this size suggests it was made as a preliminary oil sketch (bozzetto) for a larger work.

The painting has been attributed convincingly by a former Boston College undergraduate, Molly Phelps ’14, to Marco Benefial, a Roman painter trained in the classical tradition and sober realism of Raphael and Annibale Carracci. In the 1720s and 1730s, Benefial produced other paintings depicting emotionally intense events from the life of martyrs, including St. Stephen (see image). Several incorporate shirtless violent figures similar to those in the McMullen painting.

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Gaetano Lapis (1704–76)
Angel of the Annunciation, c. 1730

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.28

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Angel of the Annunciation, c. 1730. Oil on copper, Marisa Carella Collection, Rome.

The Archangel Gabriel raises his right hand in blessing and presents a lily, a symbol of Mary’s purity, in his left. Clothed in windblown drapery, his wings are partially opened. Pushed against the picture plane, the tightly cropped three-quarter-length angel looks to be landing to deliver the message prognosticating Jesus’s birth to Mary, who probably was depicted on a now lost pendant. The palette is a subtle mix of olive greens, pinks, and white; light emanating from the left focuses the viewer on the angel’s face and arm.

Born in Cagli, in the 1720s Gaetano Lapis moved to Rome where he trained under Sebastiano Conca (1680–1764) and where he subsequently established a successful career. His late baroque classical style, indebted to Carlo Maratta’s (1625–1713) restrained compositions, graceful figures, and light focused on facial expressions and hand gestures, won him important commissions, including a painting of the Birth of Venus for a ceiling of the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. Federico Lemme published a smaller version by Lapis of the McMullen’s painting (see image). He compares this cabinet picture to Lapis’s archangels in two larger paintings of the Annunciation in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino and the Monastery of San Martino ai Monti in Rome. Thus, Lapis’s image of the archangel appears to have gained currency and generated demand, possibly by young European men of means on the Grand Tour collecting works of Italian art to display in their palatial homes. The McMullen’s version seems to be in its original eighteenth-century hand-carved frame.

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Alessandro Longhi (1733–1813)
Portrait of Venetian Man and Boy, c. 1760

Oil on canvas, relined
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Mrs. Timothy Dwight, 1988.1

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Top: Punto di Venezia lace, 17–18th century. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bottom: Portrait of Carlo Goldoni, late 1800s. Oil on canvas, Casa Goldoni, Venice.

Captured in the midst of a lesson, with a quill in hand, a boy sits behind a small round rococo-style carved table strewn with his papers. Beside him on an arch-backed settee or chair draped in crimson cloth is an older gentleman, probably his father, who holds his son’s written work in his raised hand. The boy looks up from his writing to engage the viewer, while, with downcast eyes, his father appears deep in thought. Although the sitters are unknown, their clothing indicates noble status. The boy is formally attired in a brown jacket, waistcoat, lace-trimmed shirt, and black cravat. His father also wears a lace trimmed-shirt under his green silk fur-trimmed banyan, a type of informal coat that signals the scene takes place at home. Light from the left illuminating the papers and figures’ faces focuses the viewer on the double portrait’s intended message, that the father has passed on his erudition to his heir apparent.

In researching the painting, Stephanie Armstrong (BC ’14) discovered that in depicting the lace on the father’s shirt the artist takes pains to replicate the complex “Punto di Venezia” pattern developed in Venice at the beginning of the seventeenth century (see image).

The unsigned painting has been attributed to the Venetian portrait painter Alessandro Longhi, who trained under his father Pietro (1701–85), famous for his scenes of contemporary Venetian life. Alessandro’s portraits are poorly documented, but those of lesser nobles like this one and that of the Venetian playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni (1707–93, see image) display his gift for sensitive portrayal of his subjects.

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Anthonij (Anton) Mauve (1838–88)
Snow Scene with Sheep, c. 1882–88

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.91

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Vincent van Gogh, Pink Peach Trees (“Souvenir de Mauve”), March 30, 1888. Oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Mauve was a prominent member of “the Hague school,” a group of Dutch painters who sought to revive the tradition of naturalism that had characterized seventeenth-century Dutch painting through landscape and rural subjects. They have much in common with the French Barbizon artists, especially Jean-François Millet, Jules Dupré, and Constant Troyon. Snow Scene with Sheep is noteworthy for the delicacy of its tonal gradations and nuances of color. Nominally a realist scene, it also represents a nostalgia for a way of life that was already disappearing. A shepherd guides his small flock through the snow, persevering against the winter chill. The shepherd tending his flock has long been a metaphor for social and spiritual care.

Mauve influenced a number of painters, notably Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), his cousin by marriage. In his youth, Van Gogh kept a photograph of one of Mauve’s drawings hanging in his room, and always admired his paintings. Van Gogh commented that “A picture by Mauve…says more, and says it more clearly, than nature herself.” In late 1881 Mauve taught Van Gogh to paint in watercolor and helped him begin to explore the use of color in oil. Mauve even lent him paints and set him up in a studio near his house. Upon hearing of Mauve’s death in 1888, Van Gogh labeled one of his finest landscape studies, Pink Peach Trees, “Souvenir de Mauve.” A symbol of spring and resurrection, it was a fine memorial to his fellow Dutch artist.

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William Trost Richards (1833–1905)
Tintagel, c. 1882–85

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of William M. & Alison S. Vareika ’74, P’09, ’15, LP’16, 2004.13

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

This small oil sketch depicts the promontory of Tintagel, the legendary birthplace of King Arthur, at sunset. It is an unusually simple yet forceful composition. Richards spent many months in Great Britain between 1878 and 1880; he became fascinated with the geological formations along the rugged coast of Cornwall, as well as its mythic history as the home of King Arthur. Richards knew that the historic evidence for Arthur’s legend was scant, and no trace of the castle ruins can be seen in this sketch.

Richards described the cliff setting on his first visit: “At the base are many caverns, one especially opens clear through the island and the sea ebbs and flows through it. [...] The breakers were rushing through the caves with a sound more melancholy than anything I ever heard, making a great wind as they passed.” The drama of high rock cliffs and crashing waves makes a fitting setting for the romantic legend of the founder of Britain.

Richards, like La Farge, was rooted in the depiction of American landscape but both were also drawn to foreign locales—Richards to Europe, and La Farge to Japan and the South Seas. They shared a particular love for Newport, Rhode Island, where both lived.

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Pierre Subleyras (1699–1749)
Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee, c. 1737

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1988.38

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Pierre Subleyras, Meal at the House of Simon Pharisee, 1737. Oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris.

Paolo Veronese, Meal at the House of Simon Pharisee, 1567–70. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

Pierre Subleyras left France in 1728 when he was awarded a prestigious Grand Prix by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture to study in Rome. He worked in that city as one of the most celebrated painters, draftsmen, and printmakers for the rest of his life. In 1737 Subleyras received his greatest commission from the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at the Lateran for a monumental painting of the Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee (see image) to hang in the refectory of their monastery, Santa Maria Nuova at Asti, near Turin. Napoleon’s armies seized the painting in 1799, transporting it to Paris where it eventually became the property of the Louvre.

The McMullen painting, along with another in the Louvre and one in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, appears to be either a preliminary sketch for or a smaller version of the Asti painting. Shortly after its completion in 1738, Subleyras produced an engraving to circulate the image of his famous painting, and in 1748 Subleyras’s wife, Maria Tibaldi, completed a miniature copy in watercolor on vellum (now in the Musei Capitolini in Rome) based on one of the smaller oil sketches.¹ The scene of a sumptuous banquet captured in a moment of time follows the tradition of biblical paintings, with attention to still life details inspired by the Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese (1528–88) (see image).

The composition in all the versions is nearly the same with minor differences. In the monumental painting, Subleyras has the serving boy in the foreground face Christ, thereby enhancing the drama; in the smaller versions the boy turns toward the viewer. All depict the story from Luke 7:36–50 recounting that Christ agreed to dine at the home of an ungracious host, Simon the Pharisee, who did not offer him the usual hospitality. During the meal, a penitent prostitute, depicted on the left, knelt to wash Christ’s feet with her tears and tresses and anointed them with oil from an alabaster container, which lies open on the floor. Reclining on a couch and standing out in red and blue, Christ forgives and blesses the woman. The servers behind and in the foreground halt their tasks for the feast to observe the prostitute’s actions. Her remorse and desire to serve Christ provide a lesson to Simon, the host, one of the two turbaned figures conferring at the other end of the table about what they have witnessed. The narrative’s themes of charity and penitence would have contributed to the painting’s popularity and would have stimulated discourse among Catholics during the Enlightenment and among travelers to Asti on the Grand Tour.

1. For discussion of the various versions and preliminary sketches of individual figures see Olivier Michel and Pierre Rosenberg, eds. Subleyras, 1699–1749 (Paris: Musée du Luxembourg, 1987), nos. 33–41.

Permanent Collection Index

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Harriet Christina Cany Peale (1800–69)
Idealized Portrait of a Woman (Female in a Turban), c. 1840–60

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Betsy Cahill in memory of Dr. Andrew T. Cahill, 1993.3

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Domenichino (1581–1641), A Sibyl, early 1620s. Oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London.

Rembrandt Peale, Woman with Turban, 1830–40. Oil on canvas, Baltimore Museum of Art.

Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807), La speranza (Hope), 1765. Oil on canvas, Accademia di San Luca, Rome.

Rembrandt Peale, Idealized Portrait, c. 1845. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1840 Harriet Cany, a widow, became the second wife of her teacher, Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860), a member of the celebrated Philadelphia family of painters. Both she and her husband, with whom she shared a studio, painted landscapes and portraits, including several replicas of Rembrandt Peale’s celebrated “porthole” style portrait of George Washington on which the couple collaborated. As a result, Cany Peale was categorized primarily as a copyist and several of her paintings were misattributed to her husband. Known as a painter of portraits and still-life, Cany Peale more recently has been recognized as a distinguished landscape painter of the Hudson River school.

Rembrandt Peale made copies of many Baroque and eighteenth-century paintings during his travels to Italy in 1829–30. Among them were Domenichino’s Old Testament sibyls (see image), which at the time were popular with American collectors. He adapted the sibyl type for many of his portraits and what were termed “fancy pieces,” pleasing decorative images from the artist’s imagination like Woman with a Turban (see photo). Peale would have seen Angelika Kauffmann’s La speranza (Hope) in Rome (see image) at the Accademia di San Luca and likely copied it. That copy may well have inspired his elegantly dressed, turbaned Idealized Portrait (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) probably using his wife as model with her head resting on clasped hands, shoulder exposed and engaging the viewer (see photo). Cany Peale, in turn, made at least two nearly identical signed copies of her husband’s Idealized Portrait, this one in the McMullen and another in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

Permanent Collection Index

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Michele Tosini (1503–77) and assistants
Madonna with Christ and St. John the Baptist, c. 1545–60

Oil on wood panel, transferred to canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Julie Shaw (Quincy Adams Shaw), 1988.320

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530), Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist, 1517–19. Oil on panel, Wallace Collection, London.

Michele Tosini, Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, c. 1545. Oil on panel, Palmer Museum of Art, University Park.

Michele Tosini, The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, c. 1540–60s. Oil on panel, Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Burnley.

When this painting was given to Boston College in 1963, having been acquired by Boston collectors Quincy Adams Shaw and his wife Pauline in 1872, its attribution was to the Florentine Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto (see image). Since then, Heidi Hornick¹ has argued convincingly that the painting is by a lesser-known, younger artist influenced by Del Sarto, Michele di Jacopo Tosini, and his assistants. Tosini worked closely with his mentor Florentine painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483–1561) and, after the latter’s death, inherited the large and productive Ghirlandaio workshop in Florence. Between about 1540 and the early 1560s, Tosini and workshop assistants produced for the private devotion of wealthy Florentine patrons many paintings in the mannerist style featuring the Madonna and Child and St. John the Baptist. Several (see images) share with the McMullen painting elongated figures pushed against the picture plane with the Virgin in a pink dress and purple/blue mantle anchoring a pyramidal composition. Powerful female presences, Tosini’s Marys nonetheless retain their gentle elegance.

Here the Virgin gazes tenderly at the Baptist while maternally embracing her son. Tosini sets the scene against trees in the middle ground and a rocky, river landscape in the distance. Hornick attributes the Virgin to the master, but draws attention to weaknesses in the rendering of Christ and St. John, both of whose faces suffered damage in the past and recently have been conserved.

1. Heidi Hornick, “Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio (1503–77) and the Reception of Mannerism in Florence” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1990), 280 and Michele Tosini and the Ghirlandaio Workshop in Cinquecento Florence (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2009).

Permanent Collection Index

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
The Approaching Storm: White Mountain View with Hay Wagon and Figures, 1861

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.18

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Albert Bierstadt was fascinated with the epic grandeur of the American landscape. With his brothers Charles and Edward, he capitalized on the new invention of stereoscopic photography. They opened a photography shop in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1859 and in 1860 published a catalogue of photos of the American West and views of the White Mountains of New Hampshire taken from viewpoints chosen by Albert.

Albert Bierstadt in a trick photograph by Charles Bierstadt, 1861. Carte de visite album of Edward Anthony, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The White Mountains were a popular destination in the growing tourist trade, and Bierstadt painted there often, visiting at least seven times between 1852 and 1886. This painting is refreshingly naturalistic, in contrast with some of his earlier works that combined imaginary European castles with the New Hampshire landscape. The heavily loaded hay wagon is returning to the farm, the harvest now secure from being ruined by the rain. The soon-to-be-lost light dances across the canvas, illuminating the hay wagon, workers, and slices of the landscape. Is the approaching storm perhaps a metaphor for the onset of the Civil War? Stormy weather was a fundamental symbol in nineteenth-century literature and art, and Bierstadt was sophisticated in the use of imagery to mirror emotion. His interrogation of reality can be seen here in a double image of the artist pouring himself tea, echoing a similar photo of the French realist Gustave Courbet.

John Sallis
Frederick J. Adelmann, SJ Professor, Philosophy

Storm in the Mountains, c. 1870. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Nature is the subject of most of Bierstadt’s paintings. A few depict European sites, primarily in the Alps. But most represent scenes in America; the majority of these were painted during Bierstadt’s extensive traveling in the mountainous areas of the West. Many of the mountain paintings are simply entitled “Rocky Mountains,” while others identify their location, for example, Mount Rainier. In addition to the paintings of mountains, there are many others that represent various natural sites. Some show winter scenes, at Yosemite, for example. Others depict rivers such as the Hudson, lakes such as Lake Tahoe, waterfalls as at Niagara, forests such as those in California where the giant redwood trees are located. Storms also figure prominently in many of Bierstadt’s paintings. In Storm in the Mountains (see image), Bierstadt represents the storm as a black mass sweeping across the valley with an off-white cloud suspended above it. The valley is empty of everything human; the landscape is pure nature. On the other hand, in the present work, The Approaching Storm, everything is different. The White Mountains lie in the distance, in contrast to the overpowering presence of the mountains in the other painting. Moreover, the scene is set on a field, an agricultural site, not a valley surrounded by mountains. The remainder of the subtitle identifies the objects in the scene, the hay wagon and figures, presumably the figures of the humans and the horses. The horse and rider on the right side of the picture head away from the approaching storm; another figure leads a child in the same direction, and the hay wagon (with two youths on top) is drawn also in this direction by two white horses. Yet hardly less than in Storm in the Mountains, the storm can be seen raging and threatening. What the painting makes visible is the flight of humans confronted by the force of nature, their flight from the field of their everyday labor, driven in hopes of reaching shelter from the storm.

Noah Snyder
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Saco River valley and the White Mountains from Cathedral Ledge (photo: Vivek Joshi, July 2023).

Today, the White Mountains in New Hampshire are largely covered by forest (see image). This detailed painting is a reminder that in the mid-nineteenth century most of the land was cleared for agriculture—in this case growing hay in the flat valley and grazing land for sheep on the mountainsides. This is clearly a late summer scene, likely in the Saco River valley. We are lucky that Bierstadt provided such a careful record of a moment in time, because the forces of land conservation and climate change mean that the White Mountain landscape looks different now than it did a century and a half ago. What has not changed are the hard granite and metamorphic rocks that appear as boulders in the foreground and cliff bands in the background.

Lynch Collection Index

Permanent Collection Index

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Near the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, 1863

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.45

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

This idealized view of an unspoiled natural landscape, with a soft glow of the setting sun, beckons the viewer toward the Rocky Mountains while deer drink peaceably from a pristine lake. The artist juxtaposes the sublimity of the mountains with a vision of a rich and hospitable landscape seemingly fated for west-bound settlers, reflecting the concept of “manifest destiny.”

Albert Bierstadt Brothers, Albert Bierstadt at His Easel, 1859. Stereograph (detail), private collection.

Bierstadt first traveled to the American West in 1859 as part of a survey expedition, followed by a second trip in 1863. He made oil sketches and drawings and chose views for stereographs. Bierstadt traveled as far as the South Pass of the Continental Divide in southwest Wyoming. The South Pass was the easiest route to California and the Pacific Northwest and had long been used by Native Americans. It was followed by wagon trains in the 1840s and 1850s as a key part of the Oregon Trail, and was the route of the transcontinental railway completed in 1869.

With notes and photographs, Bierstadt would later finish his paintings in his studio in the Tenth Street Studio building in New York City, surrounded by Native American artifacts (see image).

Marilynn S. Johnson
Professor, History

This work was created following Bierstadt’s first trip out West in 1859, when he accompanied Frederick W. Lander’s survey party to Nebraska Territory to determine the route of the transcontinental railroad. Bierstadt produced numerous photographs and sketches, which he then referenced in his New York studio. The South Pass was a significant locale where the Oregon Trail crossed the Continental Divide, a stretch that had tested numerous overland travelers. But by 1863, parts of the trail had been replaced by stagecoaches—and soon by the railroad. Paintings like this one invited his audience West in accordance with the idea of “manifest destiny” that envisioned white settlement of the West as inevitable and divinely ordained. His Romantic view of this Rocky Mountain landscape, with deer drinking from a luminous river, portrayed a timeless frontier that would soon be transformed.

John Sallis
Frederick J. Adelmann, SJ Professor, Philosophy

No landscapes were more compelling to Bierstadt than those he observed in the Rocky Mountains. Among his paintings of the Rockies, there are depictions of sublime, snow-capped peaks, of violent storms in the mountains, of the colorful glow of sunsets over the mountains, of peaceful lakes and woods backed by mountain ranges. Many prominent contemporary critics praised Bierstadt’s work; for instance, in response to one of the artist’s paintings of a storm in the Rockies, one wrote: “No more genuine and grand work has been produced in landscape art.” An art historian described Bierstadt’s paintings: “He seeks to depict the absolute qualities and forms of things. The botanist and geologist can find work in his rocks and vegetation. He seizes upon natural phenomena with naturalistic eyes. In the quality of American light, clear, transparent, and sharp outlines, he is unsurpassed.” The painting Near the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains depicts much of what belongs to a peaceful, natural landscape: distant, unthreatening mountains, rocks and trees as they occur by nature, untouched by human intervention, a pond reflecting muted sunlight, two deer next to the pond, one drinking from it. The work as a whole gathers all that belongs most conspicuously to nature—earth, water, living beings both animate and arboreal. Peter Lynch regards Near the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains as one of his favorites. He recalls that he was inspired to acquire it following one of his more than twenty-five visits to US National Parks with his wife and three daughters.

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Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Owens Valley, California, c. 1872

Oil on panel
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.44

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Bierstadt lived in California with a studio in San Francisco between 1871–73. He met the innovative photographer Eadweard Muybridge and traveled with him and the geologist Clarence King to the new Yosemite National Park in 1872. Muybridge photographed Native Americans and Bierstadt sketched the landscape and indigenous peoples. A stereoscopic photograph (see image) by Muybridge shows Bierstadt sketching out of doors, flanked by Native Americans.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), Albert Bierstadt’s Studio, 1872. Stereograph.

The spectacular sunset over Mount Whitney is framed by the silhouetted trees in the foreground. Twilight brings a gentle end to the day in a scene that is now painfully nostalgic. The Owens River and Lake area, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles and near Death Valley, was famed for its wildlife, particularly migratory birds. The river was diverted to Los Angeles in 1913, crippling the agricultural economy of Owens Valley, and leading to the “California Water Wars” that provided the plot for the film Chinatown (1974).

Conevery Bolton Valencius
Professor, History

Top: Valley of the Yosemite, 1864. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bottom: Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum of Art.

Albert Bierstadt’s portrayals of beauty and plenty shaped the popular image of the American West. Bierstadt reassured Americans wracked by civil war that their young democracy possessed the grandeur of Europe—and might endure just as long. His sublime, tranquil paintings of Yosemite Valley in 1864–65 (see images) are one reason the United States has a National Park Service. Yet just as the creation of national parks led to the dispossession of Native communities, Americans who flocked to western lands often utterly remade those landscapes. Still water fills Bierstadt’s 1872 image of California’s Owens Valley; evening light reflects over a lush lakeside scene. Yet by the 1910s, that Owens Valley water was being pumped hundreds of miles to slake the thirst of the booming new oil town, Los Angeles. Desperate landowners in the 1920s set dynamite blasts in a failed campaign to sabotage the pipeline with which LA was sucking their lake dry. Bierstadt’s skill captured the bountiful grace of a valley his art was helping transform.

With thanks for lively discussions in the Boston College History/Environmental Studies class “This Land is Your Land: A Survey of US Environmental History” as well as the Boston College Bodies & Places workshop.

Marilynn S. Johnson
Professor, History

The Hetch Hetchy Valley, 1873, Oil on paper, laid on board.

Bierstadt traveled extensively out West in the summer of 1872, visiting Yosemite and the Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. In this painting, he captured the serene setting of the Owens Valley with the Mount Whitney mountain range in the background less than a decade after white wars against local Paiutes and Shoshone Indians opened the region for permanent white settlement. The work also offers a view of the valley wetlands some three decades before the city of Los Angeles would divert the Owens River for its own use, turning the area into a semi-desert. Like Bierstadt’s 1873 painting of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite (see image), which was later flooded by the city of San Francisco for a reservoir, his works show us the dazzling landscapes of the Sierra Nevada before they were transformed by urban demands for water in the arid West.

John Ebel
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Today, Owens Valley is primarily a desert situated between the Sierra Nevada and Inyo Mountains of eastern California. However, in 1872 the valley was a watery paradise, as Bierstadt’s painting attests. Before Los Angeles took the water from Owens Valley in the early 1900s, Owens Lake filled the valley, offering an attractive refuge for animal and plant life and human visitors. Just west of Owens Lake, majestic Mount Whitney stands over fourteen thousand feet high in the Sierra Nevada. This painting likely looks east at a sunrise over the Inyo Mountains. The year 1872 was notable in eastern California because the 7.9 magnitude Owens Valley earthquake uplifted the Sierra Nevada about ten feet in a major fault movement. Bierstadt may have experienced the earthquake around the time of the painting’s creation.

John Sallis
Frederick J. Adelmann, SJ Professor, Philosophy

Although Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany, he grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He traveled extensively, returning repeatedly to Europe, where he had the opportunity to meet a number of internationally renowned figures. In Rome he and his wife visited the composer Franz Liszt, and in London he became acquainted with the American poet and educator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One of the most profound influences on his later work was a mountain climbing adventure in the Apennines, where, from above, he could observe the features of the mountainous terrain. This experience portended his engagement in producing paintings of mountain scenes, which became ever more enthralling as he traveled across the United States, painting in grand style the magnificent mountains, as in Yosemite, and the seemingly endless expanse of the prairies. To a friend he wrote: “The color of the mountains and of the plains, and, indeed, that of the entire country, reminds one of the color of Italy; in fact, we have here the Italy of America in a primitive condition.” Bierstadt traveled along the routes leading finally to California, and it was there that he produced his painting of Owens Valley. Even though the landscape itself is less than Italianate, the colors could indeed have reminded him of the light he had once observed in Italy—the reddish shades of dusk, the increasing darkness of the lake and the trees.

Noah Snyder
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Owens Lake in 2013 (photo: Kirk Siegler).

Bierstadt’s painting of a silhouette of a pair of herons and trees with a twilit sky behind provides a glimpse of how this place looked before much of its water was diverted to irrigate the farm fields and orange groves of southern California and fuel the growth of Los Angeles. Owens Valley is still one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but it would be hard to recreate this scene, as many of these wetlands are now dry salt flats (see image). The position of the sun and the distant mountains suggests sunrise because Bierstadt does not depict the steep front of the Sierra Nevada, which defines the western side of the valley. Another interesting aspect to contemplate is that Bierstadt visited Owens Valley in summer 1872, just a few months after a major earthquake. Evidence of this event can still be seen today, as ridges that show the Sierra Nevada pushed twenty feet up relative to the valley floor along the fault line. The painting does not provide obvious evidence of the earthquake, but Bierstadt must have seen the aftermath in both the sparsely populated settlements and the natural landscape.

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William Bradford (1823–92)
Among the Ice Floes, 1878

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.46

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: William Bradford, Steamer and Iceberg, 1873. Photograph, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bottom: Nipped in the Ice, hand-colored lithograph, published by Currier & Ives, after painting attributed to William Bradford, after 1877, Mystic Seaport Museum.

William Bradford was a largely self-taught painter, drawn to scenes he described as “wild, strange and magnificent.” He instigated several expeditions to the Arctic, supplementing his sketches with photographs of the natural beauty and dangers of the polar regions. Reflecting popular interest in the heroic and frequently tragic voyages of explorers and whalers, he published a book titled The Arctic Regions, Illustrated with Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland (1873). Bradford also provided images of these exotic and forbidding seascapes for mass produced lithographs by Currier & Ives (1835–1907). In this painting, small figures of sailors toil on the ice, while their three-masted ship sits with sails furled. Large icebergs balance the composition, and a distant vessel is shrouded in mist. It is an image of perilous work, adventure, and the sublimity of the polar regions.

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Caught in the ice floes, a group of men face a perilous moment in the Arctic. The painter, William Bradford, had confronted a comparable situation himself. In 1869, he traveled up the west coast of Greenland, turning back only when ice threatened to trap his ship in the uppermost reaches of Baffin Bay. This painting captures the overwhelming desolation that Bradford encountered there, where he saw what he described as an infinite expanse of ice that lay “perfectly unbroken, except where great icebergs pierced through it.”¹ To capture the vastness of the landscape, Bradford here juxtaposes the triple masted ship in the foreground with a similar vessel in the distance, which appears miniature in comparison with the iceberg at the composition’s center. Ant-sized men shuttle across the ice between the ships, scarcely visible through the haze.

“Hunting by steam, the party killing six polar bears in one day. Melville Bay Aug 10th 1869.” William Bradford, The Arctic Regions.

Although Bradford based the painting on his experience, he did not seek to create a faithful record of his voyage. He generally composed his Arctic paintings by combining sketches from his trip, scenes recorded by the two photographers who accompanied him, and elements of his own invention. The ship in the foreground of this painting resembles the vessel from Bradford’s expedition, the Panther, but with a notable modification: Bradford here eliminates the smokestack for the Panther’s coal-fired steam engine, indicating that the men in the painting must rely on sail alone to extricate themselves from their predicament. Photographs of the Panther (see photo), by contrast, show a dark plume of smoke billowing from its chimney as it burns through the five hundred tons of coal that it carried as fuel.² That carbon-loaded exhaust would, unbeknownst to Bradford, come to threaten the existence of the Arctic landscape that had struck him as boundless and eternal.

1. Quoted in Richard C. Kugler, William Bradford: Sailing Ships & Arctic Seas (New Bedford: New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2003), 79.

2. For the fuel capacity of the ship, see John Wilmerding, William Bradford, 1823–1892 (New Bedford: Whaling Museum of New Bedford, 1970), 16.

Ethan Baxter
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Viewed in the context of climate change, Bradford’s paintings depicting the frozen polar regions from one hundred fifty years ago conjure up feelings of anxiety and reminiscence in a geoscientist. Anxiety, because such Arctic scenes have already become far less pervasive than they were in Bradford’s time and point to a troubling climate future that is upon us. Reminiscence, because those icy scenes may someday be gone forever, preserved now only in memories, illustrations, and paintings like this and his Trapped in Packed Ice nearby. Every September, Arctic sea ice melts and reaches its annual minimum extent. Warming climates have reduced the areal coverage and thickness of Arctic sea ice by about 60 percent since 1878 when Bradford painted this work (see figures 1a, 1b), and all of that reduction has occurred since c. 1970. At its present rate of decline, summer Arctic sea ice will be completely gone sometime in the latter half of this century. While the opening of shipping lanes in the Arctic might seem attractive to mariners like the souls pictured in Bradford’s works (like the fabled Northwest Passage that opened for the first time in 2012, see figure 1c), the accompanying consequences of global warming will far outweigh this apparent benefit. Ice, a majestic blue-tinted rock in its own right, is slowly fading from the surface of planet Earth for the first time in human history. Bradford’s painting captures its story.

Christy Pottroff
Assistant Professor, English

Arctic expeditions—like those depicted in this painting and Trapped in Packed Ice by William Bradford—were exercises in extremity. Driven toward the impossibly remote landscapes of the Arctic Circle, sailors endured extreme temperatures and traversed a harsh and unfamiliar ecosystem where the sun shines constantly in the summer and darkness falls for months every winter.

Hundreds of ships sought the perils of the ice over the course of the nineteenth century—to scout out and forge faster trade routes through the Arctic Circle. Most ships carried about fifty men, traveled in small fleets, and were provisioned for voyages of two to three years. Many were funded by European national governments, who imagined themselves to be building the infrastructure for global trade—through the icy ends of the Earth.

Within this world of extremes sits American painter William Bradford, cold—shivering, despite his layers of winter wear—sketching, drafting, and painting in subzero temperatures. This work captures the domineering, ice-chiseled landscape of the Arctic, where icebergs tower over ships, rendering sailors miniscule by comparison. Bradford’s brush also elaborates the eerie and uncanny light of the North for his viewers: Among the Ice Floes is haunted by haze and shadow. Light was scarce in the Arctic; Bradford’s brush finds it, pulls it from the frozen context, and works against the elements to preserve its effect in scenes on canvas.

In some respects, the Arctic expeditions of the nineteenth century were failures—the ice-bound passage was not a viable trade route, thousands of human lives were lost seeking it out, and the expeditionary and capitalistic values that charted the paths of these ships continue to be driving forces of climate change. These paintings by Bradford are some of the greatest successes of the expeditions (along with the travel narratives, ship-made newspapers, and other testaments to human fortitude under extreme environmental conditions). Bradford’s paintings attest to the formidable and otherworldly nature of the Arctic as it was in the nineteenth century—and inspire respect for a landscape that faces the greatest threat to climate change today.

For a nonfiction study of a broad range of polar media, read Hester Blum’s The News at the End of the Earth. For Antarctic fiction, pair Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and its haunting and unfinished ending, protagonist adrift near the South Pole—with Mat Johnson’s satirical fantasy Pym, a modern retelling that traverses the same geographical extremes to explore enduring questions of race and racism in the American imagination.

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William Bradford (1823–92)
Trapped in Packed Ice, 1877

Oil on canvas, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.47

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Caspar David Friedrich, Wreck in the Sea of Ice, 1798. Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Trapped in Packed Ice is a dramatic illustration of the dangers of Arctic exploration. Pack ice often trapped and crushed ships. In 1871, thirty-three whaling ships, many from New England, were trapped and destroyed by pack ice off the Alaska coast. The motif of the “storm-tossed boat” was a key symbol of the perils of the “voyage of life” from the Romantic era onward, as seen in haunting images by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). The delicate structure of the masts and rigging is juxtaposed with the implacable solidity of the massive icebergs. The small forms of the sailors on the ice remind the viewer of the fragility of humans who have tested themselves against the sublime power of nature.

Ethan Baxter
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Viewed in the context of climate change, Bradford’s paintings depicting the frozen polar regions from one hundred fifty years ago conjure up feelings of anxiety and reminiscence in a geoscientist. Anxiety, because such Arctic scenes have already become far less pervasive than they were in Bradford’s time and point to a troubling climate future that is upon us. Reminiscence, because those icy scenes may someday be gone forever, preserved now only in memories, illustrations, and paintings like this and his Among the Ice Floes nearby. Every September, Arctic sea ice melts and reaches its annual minimum extent. Warming climates have reduced the areal coverage and thickness of Arctic sea ice by about 60 percent since 1878 when Bradford painted these (see figures 1a, 1b), and all of that reduction has occurred since c. 1970. At its present rate of decline, summer Arctic sea ice will be completely gone sometime in the latter half of this century. While the opening of shipping lanes in the Arctic might seem attractive to mariners like the souls pictured in Bradford’s works (like the fabled Northwest Passage that opened for the first time in 2012, see figure 1c), the accompanying consequences of global warming will far outweigh this apparent benefit. Ice, a majestic blue-tinted rock in its own right, is slowly fading from the surface of planet Earth for the first time in human history. Bradford’s painting captures its story.

Christy Pottroff
Assistant Professor, English

Arctic expeditions—like those depicted in this painting and Among the Ice Floes by William Bradford—were exercises in extremity. Driven toward the impossibly remote landscapes of the Arctic Circle, sailors endured extreme temperatures and traversed a harsh and unfamiliar ecosystem where the sun shines constantly in the summer and darkness falls for months every winter.

Within this world of extremes sits American painter William Bradford, cold—shivering, despite his layers of winter wear—sketching, drafting, and painting in subzero temperatures. This work captures the domineering, ice-chiseled landscape of the Arctic, where icebergs tower over ships, rendering sailors miniscule by comparison. Bradford’s brush also elaborates the eerie and uncanny light of the North for his viewers: Trapped in Packed Ice pronounces a dramatic interplay of white, gray, and blue on what must have been one of the sunniest days of his expedition. Light was scarce in the Arctic; Bradford’s brush finds it, pulls it from the frozen context, and works against the elements to preserve its effect in scenes on canvas.

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James Edward Buttersworth (1817–94)
Racing Yachts, n.d.

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.48

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

The noted marine painter James Edward Buttersworth was born in England in 1817, and moved to the United States in 1847, working from a studio in Brooklyn. The busy port of New York offered many subjects. Scholars distinguish between marine painters and seascape artists, as marine painters like Buttersworth have a high degree of technical knowledge of ships. Although a prolific artist, he rarely exhibited, instead selling directly to clients. Taking advantage of new commercial opportunities, he made his work available to a mass audience through lithographs published by Currier & Ives (1835–1907).

United States Packet Ship “New World,” built in Boston, 1846. Print after painting by Samuel Walters (1811–82), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

As shipping technology changed, Buttersworth followed the new interest in recreational and racing sailing, specializing in this from the 1870s. Racing Yachts shows three sleek yachts speeding past a slower commercial packet ship. Packet ships were the first to sail between American and European ports on regular schedules, and were the forerunners of twentieth-century ocean liners. Both kinds of ship thus reflect modernist trends. The sharp angles and billowed sails of the racing yachts create a dynamic image, juxtaposed with the larger and slower packet ship. In this modern industrial age, speed was a new form of beauty. Sailing for pleasure rather than strictly for commerce still pitted humans against nature, and his painting evokes the confidence and excitement of this era, which was exemplified by the America’s Cup competition.

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Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926)
Mother and Child, c. 1889

Watercolor on paper
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.58

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

In this watercolor study of a mother holding a baby, Cassatt demonstrates her ability to conjure a world with astonishing efficiency. A few lines define the contours of the figures, while a blue wash and touches of orange establish the major planes of color. Cassatt’s marks, though economical, create an atmosphere of deep intimacy and filial affection, fusing the mother and child into a cohesive unit. The blue of the child’s costume appears to merge with the bottom half of the mother’s dress, making it difficult to tell where one person’s clothing ends and the other’s begins.

Baby in Dark Blue Suit, Looking Over His Mother’s Shoulder, 1889. Oil on canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum.

This study served as the basis for a larger oil painting (see image), now in the Cincinnati Art Museum. The final work is more tightly cropped around the upper half of the figures, accentuating the closeness of the embrace. Though it is more developed than the watercolor, the oil painting maintains the restricted palette and sparing touch of the smaller sketch. In both works, Cassatt integrates the mother and child through a patchwork of shared colors and interweaving lines, using formal relationships to convey personal bonds.

Marina Berzins McCoy
Professor, Philosophy

Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child depicts an ordinary moment in domestic life: a mother holding a child who gazes out into space. The scene is reminiscent of a Madonna and child; even the blue color evokes Mary. But the figures here are not divine, but worldly. Traditionally the child Jesus may be shown seated and looking out toward the viewer of the painting, or gazing lovingly up to his mother’s face. Philosophical concepts can assist us in deepening our understanding of this work. In the present painting, this child’s gaze is directed neither at his mother nor to the viewer, but outward into space. The mother’s face is obscured so that we cannot see it; we have no sense of her individuality, only of her role as child bearer. This deliberate obscuration of the mother by her child, at the same time that she supports him, raises questions about recognition. Human identity is in part formed through mutual recognition, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur has argued. Mature persons are both the subjects and objects of mutual recognition, as part of our fundamental ethical attitudes towards one another. Insofar as we fail to recognize another, it is an ethical failure. Here, Cassatt investigates the viewer’s recognition of the seated woman. Is her identity given by, or obscured by her maternity? To what extent is her sense of self apart from her maternal role “hidden”? How is motherhood both essential to her identity and a possible site of obscuration?

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Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900)
New England Landscape, 1849

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.43

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Top: Ira Mountain, Vermont, 1849–50. Oil on canvas, Olana State Historic Site, Hudson. Bottom: Twilight, “Short Arbiter ’twixt Day and Night” (Sunset), 1850. Oil on canvas, Newark Museum of Art.

The twenty-three-year-old Frederic Edwin Church spent the summer of 1849 in New England, settling in the region of Cuttingsville, Vermont.¹ This jewel-like study of a hilly field at sunset was likely made in the area. The painting’s diminutive size belies Church’s larger ambitions. Having recently become one of the youngest painters ever elected to New York’s National Academy of Design, he spent his time in Vermont producing small studies to incorporate into larger canvases that he would exhibit in New York the following year.² Among the most important of these works were two paintings of sunsets over Vermont meadows: Ira Mountain, Vermont and Twilight, “Short Arbiter ’twixt Day and Night” (both shown here). Neither picture corresponds exactly to this study in its composition. What they share is Church’s attention to the spectacular effects of the sun’s passage over the horizon, when the sky sets itself ablaze and transforms terrestrial bodies into shadowy silhouettes.

1. David Carew Huntington, “Frederic Edwin Church, 1826–1900: Painter of the Adamic New World Myth” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1969), 24.

2. Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 43.

Paul Lewis
Professor, English

This small painting invites us into a sun-soaked world of sloping fields and a few trees. On the lower left, a farmer is driving a wagon along a fence line behind a group of sheep. At the spatial and thematic center, the sun illuminates the landscape from behind and the sky from below. Most likely focused on the task at hand, the farmer is nonetheless headed up toward and almost into the sun. The word “sun” appears over a hundred times in Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), including in this passage from the “Economy” chapter that Church’s landscape brought to mind:

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

Gregory Fried
Professor, Philosophy

When Church painted this small landscape in August of 1849, he was only twenty-three years old, but he was already three years out from a two-year apprenticeship with the landscape painter, Thomas Cole (1801–48). With Cole, he had toured the Catskills of New York and the Berkshires of Massachusetts to sketch vistas for studio work; this scene evokes rural New England. It is at once very unlike Church’s famous mature paintings, yet nevertheless hints at his late work. First, it looks as if it were painted on scene, not worked up in the studio using sketches, as was Church’s norm. It has an immediacy and an intimacy absent from his famous grand landscapes. A naivete in Church’s brushwork here fits the modest, rural world of Yankee farmers. Yet, a blinding burst of sun threatens to immolate the scene, overwhelming the purple-gray hill in the distance, its late summer light held at bay only by small trees in the foreground. Church’s brushwork accentuates the sunburst with long, linear strokes that radiate from the focal point. The tiny figure riding away in his wagon, almost certainly a farmer given his white shirt and black vest and tall, wide-brimmed hat, seems both oblivious to and unaffected by the sublime, overwhelming sun-stroke and his wagon catching an unappreciated red lick of light on its side.

By the late 1840s, Church was falling under the influence of the German naturalist and philosopher, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who challenged artists to travel widely from home to give witness to the world’s glories. Within ten years, Church’s massive canvasses of majestic scenes would win him glory in America and Europe. Those later paintings cudgel viewers over the head with their monumental visions; this one invites them not to ignore the transcendent present amid the normalcy of nature, on a scale any of us could hang on our wall. Like the aptly named transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), who were establishing their voices as writers in this decade, here Church wanted to illuminate the experience of awe in the nearness of the everyday in nature.

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Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80)
The Ruins of the Parthenon, 1869–80

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.49

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: Photograph of Gifford in military uniform, 1860s. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bottom: Ruins of the Parthenon, 1880. Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Gifford specialized in landscape, first painting scenes of the Hudson River, the Adirondacks, and the mountains of Vermont. He traveled to Europe in 1855–57, when he met and traveled with Albert Bierstadt. Gifford served in the New York Militia during the Civil War from 1861–63 (see photo).

In 1868–69, Gifford made his second and last European visit, this time adding an excursion down the Nile and stops in Turkey and Greece. From sketches made at this time, he later created several important versions of The Ruins of the Parthenon, including a larger canvas in the National Gallery of Art (see image). His paintings are precise and filled with light, linking him to the luminists. The accurate detail of this painting suggests that he used photographic imagery as well as his sketches. The ruins of this still noble temple evoke comparisons of past and present. The ancient Greek civilization was widely seen as the birthplace of democracy; the enduring ruins were particularly poignant in the aftermath of the Civil War. It was one of his last works; Gifford died of malaria in 1880.

Marina Berzins McCoy
Professor, Philosophy

In the field of philosophy, “perspectivism” emphasizes the perspectival nature of all knowing. We perceive the world from particular points of view, and do not simply experience the world in its completeness. If I see one side of a mountain, its other side is obscured. Likewise, a mountain at a distance is experienced radically differently than one that I am hiking. The categories that we use in order to interpret the world are also perspectival. To define beauty as the harmonious captures one aspect of beauty, but not what Plato named as “Beauty itself.”

Frederic Edwin Church (1926–1900), The Parthenon, 1871. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sanford Robinson Gifford’s The Ruins of the Parthenon is deeply engaged with perspective. Many see this 1880 painting as a response to an 1871 one by Gifford’s friend, Frederic Edwin Church (see image). Both treat the subject of the Parthenon. Church takes a perspective from below the building, looking up at its decaying majesty central to the space of the painting. It is illuminated by sun and warm colors. Church’s ruins hark back to a nostalgia for the Athenian Empire under Pericles. Gifford, in contrast, places the Parthenon to the left of his painting, where it forms only one part of the larger landscape. In the distance, we see a mountain range, and in the immediate foreground, the tiny figure of a person near fallen stonework. The partially deteriorating Parthenon exists somewhere between the brevity of human life and the enduring mountains. Gifford’s work resituates our vision so that we can more clearly see human accomplishments as “in between.” In regarding this work in dialogue with Church’s, we are also invited to grow in our self-understanding as perspective takers and makers.

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Acropolis. Athens May 5th ‘69 (from the 1869 sketchbook). Graphite and chalk, private collection.

Room 18 in the British Museum, where the Parthenon Marbles have been displayed since the 1960s.

Gifford made several paintings, of which this is one, based on a sketch created during his visit to the Acropolis in Athens in May 1869 (see image). The artist professed they were “not…picture[s] of a building but…picture[s] of a day.”¹ Regardless of his intent, the east portion of the Parthenon appears here as a relatively accurate representation of the Greek temple after it was stripped of about half of its original fifth century BCE sculpted frieze, metopes, and pediments by the Earl of Elgin and his agents between 1801 and 1812. Shipped shortly thereafter by Elgin to London, those sculptures by 1832 had become highlights of the British Museum’s collection (see image). Elgin claimed to have removed the marbles with the permission of the Ottoman Sultanate which exercised authority over Athens at the time and to which he was then British ambassador. Discussions between British and Greek officials continue to this day about whether the Parthenon Marbles were looted and should be returned to Athens, because of their cultural importance to Greece, where they could be appreciated by the public in proximity to the other Parthenon sculptures in the Acropolis Museum opened in 2009.

1. His monumental, and presumed to be his final, painting of the scene now in the National Gallery in Washington, bears the date 1880. The present work could have been completed any time after the 1869 sketch, to which it is very close in detail, and Gifford’s death in 1880.

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William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900)
Rocks at Narragansett, 1863

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.50

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: Indian Rock with Two Fishermen, Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, c. 1862–63. Ink, ink wash, and graphite on paper, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth. Bottom: Indian Rock, or Hazard Rock, Hazard Avenue, Narragansett, Rhode Island, August 3, 2022. Photograph: Jeffery Howe.

Haseltine spent the summers of 1862 and 1863 in Narragansett, Rhode Island, painting the rocky coast. Rocks at Narragansett depicts the site known as Indian Rock or Hazard Rock. Although the name Hazard Rock derives from the prominent Hazard family, it is known to fishermen as one the most dangerous places to fish in the United States. The exact location is confirmed by a related drawing that includes two fishermen (see image). The apparent flat expanse of rock is in fact the top of an underwater cavern, and the crashing waves create treacherous currents. The name Indian Rock also evokes Native legends and loss; as early as 1767 Narragansett tribal members lamented that all the land by the sea had been taken by the white colonists. The spectacular site was used for outdoor Episcopalian church services in the 1850s. In 1880 Rhode Island lawmakers declared the Narragansett extinct, seeking to erase them from the land.

Known for his precision and geologic accuracy, the artist captures a single moment and depicts the exact light of the sun hitting the rocks and reflecting off the water at that instant. Unlike his impressionist contemporaries, his work is clearly defined with a sharp realism. The eternal flux of the ocean is in tension with the seeming stasis of the rock, which nonetheless erodes with the waves. Art and science were seen as complementary by John Ruskin and many artists. Haseltine asserted that “every real artist is also a scientist, and scientists were also artists in the truest sense of the word.” Art historian Rebecca Bedell suggests that Haseltine may have been influenced by the popular public lectures on geological history given at Harvard by the now controversial scientist Louis Agassiz.

John Sallis
Frederick J. Adelmann, SJ Professor, Philosophy

Haseltine’s paintings are typical of the Hudson River school. As with most of the artists to whom this designation is applied, Haseltine established his reputation as a landscape painter. His paintings often drew from sketches of popular seaside resorts. Yet his most celebrated works were those portraying the rocky coast of New England. These “rock portraits” were geologically so precise that certain critics declared that they served both science and art. The southern coast of Rhode Island was among his favorite subjects, as in this depiction of rocks at a shore area around Narragansett. As with most of the works by artists of the Hudson River school, those of Haseltine display a close relationship with the natural elements and with the light and the configurations that bind them together. In Rocks at Narragansett it is the protrusion of the stones, appearing as though they emerged from the sea, that constitutes the primary subject. The pool splashing onto the rocks reflects the pale blue of the sky. These elements of nature—stones, water, sky—are thus bound together. The only sign of human presence in this natural setting are the sailboats far out at sea.

Ethan Baxter
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Haseltine’s Rocks at Narragansett depicts a classic rocky New England coastline, reminiscent of scenes from this spot in Rhode Island to the famous shores of Acadia National Park in Maine. The particular rock of these cliffs is granite, the product of molten magma coalescing and crystallizing slowly, deep within the Earth’s crust about 275 million years ago. This was the time of Pangea—the great supercontinent that unified all land onto a single mass, with modern day New England sandwiched in the middle. Granite’s well-formed interlocking crystals of quartz, feldspar, and a few other minerals give granite its strength. The feldspar takes on a brownish or even pinkish hue that gives it its color. And its slow cooling history gives it the distinctive rectangular blockiness formed by uniformly oriented contractional “joints” or “sheets” in the rocks. Upon closer inspection, sometimes those cracks served as conduits for hot fluids deep in the crust that can precipitate other minerals on those surfaces, like pistachio-green coatings of epidote. Now as the cooler water of the waves sweep across these rocky shores and into those cracks, the ocean itself can precipitate crystals of salt reflecting the modern surface ocean. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the rocks, we see indications of marine life (seaweed) establishing a foothold on the rock itself, sure to last as long as sea level maintains its current place. Finally, in the distance, we see the faint outlines of sailboats, evidence of another remarkable lifeform that has left its own mark on our remarkable planet. Artists like Haseltine have the opportunity to capture the stories of fire and water and life juxtaposed in these rocks and waves.

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Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935)
Water Hazard—Maidstone Links, 1923

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.51

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Top: The Dome Green (Maidstone), 1923. Oil on panel, private collection. Bottom: East Course, Maidstone Club, 1926. Oil on board, private collection.

When Hassam made this painting, golf courses and country clubs were relatively new features of American life, constructed with Gilded Age fortunes and shaped by a nostalgia for the landscapes of British manor estates.¹ Hassam himself was an avid golfer and member of the Maidstone Club on Long Island, which he used as the setting for multiple paintings (see images). Several of these works depict women golfers, whose presence in American country clubs attracted extensive social commentary at the time. Many writers argued that country clubs provided an unprecedented degree of female autonomy.² “It has brought our women out of stuffy houses and out of their own hopeless, aimless selves,” Munsey’s Magazine declared in 1902.³ Women’s roles in country clubs, however, remained circumscribed; when golfing, they were frequently relegated to secondary courses or allowed to play the regular eighteen holes only after proving their skill, as was the rule at Maidstone.⁴

Hassam’s depiction of women golfers may have been driven less by an interest in changing gender norms than by his fascination with the female form in the landscape, which he regarded as an ancient subject. The statue-like rigidity of Hassam’s golfers and their arrangement in the flattened configuration of a frieze reflect Hassam’s efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to evoke the archaic forms of the Classical world.⁵ His attachment to ancient culture was intertwined with what Barbara Weinberg has described as his growing “xenophobia and nativism,” according to which modernism was the corrupt product of “foreign” influence.⁶ By this late phase in his career, Hassam denied his obvious debt to French impressionism, and he was fond of quoting the critic Royal Cortissoz’s denigration of modernist painting as “Ellis Island art.”⁷ The Maidstone Club, like many country clubs at the time, provided a hospitable environment for these views, codifying them in its membership policies (Jews were first admitted to Maidstone in 1976, and the club reportedly had no Black members into the twenty-first century⁸).

1. James M. Mayo, The American Country Club: Its Origins and Development (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

2. Mayo, American Country Club, 82–87.

3. Frank S. Arnett, “American Country Clubs,” Munsey’s Magazine 27, no. 4 (July 1902): 482.

4. Mayo, American Country Club, 99.

5. H. Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 244–46.

6. Weinberg, 18 and 244.

7. Hassam quoted in Weinberg, 18.

8. For the first Jewish members, see Paul Delaney, “Discrimination Remains a Policy and a Practice at Many Clubs,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1976, 29; Steven Gaines, Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons (New York: Little, Brown, 1998), 195. For the absence of Black members, see Bruce Weber, “Members Only,” New York Times, June 14, 1992, sec. Style, 10; Peter de Jonge, “Barbarian at the Tee: An Uninvited Non-Member Plays a Round at the Maidstone Club,” New York Magazine, Aug. 18, 2005.

John Ebel
Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences

Two women with their young caddies are enjoying a round of golf on a beautiful summer’s day. One woman has just hit her tee shot and looks at the result of her endeavor. The other patiently waits her turn, club in hand. Hassam captures the natural beauty of eastern Long Island, New York, with a small pond guarded by a thick growth of reeds in the foreground and an expanse of grass and sand in the background. The women are dressed in the bright colors and styles of the 1920s, as are the caddies. The timeless beauty of this golf course is enjoyed today in much the same way as it was a hundred years ago.

Eileen Sweeney
Professor, Philosophy

With its explosion of color and visible separate brushstrokes, Water Hazard—Maidstone Links shows the strong influence on Hassam by the impressionists. Philosophical ideas about the relationship between sensation and concept formation illuminate the name “impressionism” as did Monet’s advice to students to paint what they see, not so much objects but patches of color, which we see enacted in Hassam’s work. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that we take in raw sensation, for example, patches of color rather than fully formed objects, and only come to “see” things as distinct and three-dimensional objects by processing them, placing them in space (and time) and organizing them under concepts using reason. Moreover, Kant thought that the experience of pleasure in beauty is in the “play” of imagination and reason, using reason but not to organize impressions into fully formed defined objects, but rather to reflect back on the subject who sees and experiences. Hassam presents impressions of the scene on the links before they are turned into full-fledged objects, giving access to the naive sensations before they are processed. The grassy foreground is composed of disaggregated spots of color, while in the distance the color is blended into larger patches. According to Kant reason tells us that the grass we see in the distance is like the grass we see up close, that it is not really a single carpet of green but composed of multiple colors, but what we actually see, the sense impressions, in the distance is different from what we see up close, and this difference is what Hassam depicts. It is a new way of seeing that is both more “realist”—what we “really” see—and more “subjective”—about what is going on in the viewer’s mind, that brings us the pleasure in sensation itself, which is normally lost in the structuring and rationalization of experience.

Hassam paints a very ordinary scene from his present, not from history or allegory. Although playing golf requires wealth and privilege, he depicts the people here as ordinary, wearing basic golfing attire. It is a “modern” scene, where the women are playing the sport, attended by male caddies. Kant thought that we have to place the onslaught of sensation into three-dimensional space as well as into the sequence of time. This painting is of an unremarkable moment in time abstracted from any sequence without any evocation of a larger narrative. Nature rather than people was the most common impressionist subject, but here Hassam blends the people into the landscape. The landscape is not there to show them but vice versa. Hassam seems to have chosen to depict the people as “wooden” in an attempt to access sensation freed from concepts and three-dimensionality. In ordinary experience, visual data is subsumed under concepts—man, woman, male, female—and the visual details fade into that whole. We only see one side of an object and reason supplies the sides and the back, their three-dimensionality. Hassam brings us back to the experience of the human figures as bright and vibrant patches and dabs of color, flat rather than rounded. He focuses on the surface and patterns on their clothing, rather than on their depth. The depiction of the players is detached and also takes steps toward abstraction as they are rendered as shapes and patterns, and as elongated and still. The movement in the painting comes from the beautiful grasses on the shore on the bottom right that bend in the breeze.

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Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935)
Spring Flowering Trees, c. 1900

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.52

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Apple Trees in Bloom, Old Lyme, 1904. Oil on panel, private collection.

Trained in Boston, first as a wood engraver and then as a watercolor painter, by 1883 Hassam established himself in a studio on Tremont Street as a painter of city views and landscapes in the thickly painted style of the French Barbizons. Popular with American collectors, Barbizon artists like Jules Dupré (1811–99), focused on rural scenes (see his painting Landscape with Woman in Red displayed on this floor). From 1886 to 1889, while living in Paris and studying at the Académie Julian, Hassam began to blend impressionist brushstrokes with more solid figures. In 1889 he relocated his studio to New York, but to escape urban life traveled during the spring and summer months to various New England coastal towns, where he often indulged his lifelong attraction to painting the transient beauty of the natural world.

Blossoming trees were a recurrent motif throughout his career, affording Hassam the opportunity to capture with impressionist brushstrokes flickering light on the flowers. In the present work, as in Apple Trees in Bloom depicting the foliage in front of his studio in Old Lyme, Connecticut (see image), he places an older, sprawling tree behind a more vital younger one, a juxtaposition interpreted by scholars as conveying the nostalgia for the past and optimism for the future prevalent among Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹

1. Susan Larkin, “Hassam in New England,” in Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, ed. H. Barbara Weinberg (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 157.

Eileen Sweeney
Professor, Philosophy

This painting is a luscious, cotton-candy depiction of flowering spring trees. It might be too “pretty” except that Hassam’s composition feels like a spontaneous and momentary glance, not “composed” in a classical sense. The large tree in the background is cut off at the side and top. It almost looks like it grows out of the tree in the foreground, and the composition is overbalanced on the left. Invoking the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) ideas that the placement of sensations into three-dimensional space and the distinction of objects from one another are the work of reason and not given in sensation or imagination, Hassam makes us observe the way our mind “corrects” the painting, realizing two distinct trees, one behind the other by some distance. Everything but the blossoms is dark and indistinct. If Hassam’s Water Hazard—Maidstone Links emphasizes an objective “just-the-sensations” where people are patches of color in the landscape, Spring Flowering Trees emphasizes the subjective experience of seeing the blooming tree. The tree takes over the painting so that we experience the joyful shock of the trees dressed in their temporary spring flowers. The painting displays the fleeting moment of full spring in ways we do not ever actually “see” it but captures how we “see” it subjectively. So while in the Maidstone Links painting nearby, objects are patches of color, disintegrated into what we “objectively see,” here the focus is blurred and the colors blended, presenting the trees in a single subjective flash of beauty and joy. Hassam captures the pleasure of seeing for and in the subject, Kant would say, conveying the essence of the experience such that we can almost smell the flowers.

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Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)
Orchid and Hummingbirds near a Mountain Lake, c. 1875–90

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.54

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Inspired by Heade’s travels in Brazil during the 1860s, this painting was equally shaped by the art market that he encountered upon returning to the United States. In a competitive field of American landscape painting that was dominated by better-known contemporaries such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), Heade needed to find ways to stand out.¹ Idiosyncratic views of foreign flora and fauna provided him with a commercially viable path. Heade’s tropical subject matter differentiated him from competitors, but what truly distinguished him was a compositional innovation: juxtaposing detailed studies of orchids and hummingbirds with distant vistas, he created a radical separation between foreground and background. The combination of micro and macro scales allowed Heade to incorporate the conventions of natural history illustration and landscape painting into something that transcended both traditions, turning birds and plants into dramatic actors on an exotic stage.

Hummingbirds and Orchids, c. 1875–90. Oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts.

Though set in nature, these scenes were carefully constructed products of the studio. The orchid in this painting, for example, was transposed from Heade’s stock repertoire of plant studies, which he repeatedly inserted into compositions either by tracing or through another means of mechanical transfer.² Heade’s Hummingbirds and Orchids in the Detroit Institute of Arts (see image) contains a blossom that matches this one in almost every detail. In fact, the same orchid is present in at least twenty-one of Heade’s paintings—a number that testifies to the commercial success of these works (which may explain the artist’s need for expedient production methods).³

1. For Heade’s efforts to establish a market for himself while in the shadow of Church, see Maggie M. Cao, “Heade’s Hummingbirds and the Ungrounding of Landscape,” American Art 25, no. 3 (2011): 48–75.

2. Karen E. Quinn, “Passion Flowers,” in Martin Johnson Heade, ed. Theodore E. Stebbins (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), 113; Theodore E. Stebbins, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 94.

3. Quinn, “Passion Flowers,” 113.

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

This painting is one in a series of hummingbird and orchid paintings that Heade produced between about 1875 and 1890. Painted more than a decade after his trip to Brazil in 1863, Heade pairs the flowers and birds in an imagined tableau synthesized from earlier sketches (see image), memory, and perhaps external sources. In these fanciful paintings, Heade is free to depict his subjects in a variety of lively poses and to fill the scenes with luminous and saturated color.

Top: From Heade’s Brazilian Sketchbook and Journal, 1865. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Bottom: Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds, c. 1870–90. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The orchid is a ruby-lipped Cattleya. Cattleya is a genus of tropical South American orchids that are epiphytic (growing on other plants). They are not parasites, however, deriving their nutrients from the air, rain, and dust that fall on them. Like the hummingbirds, the orchids “travel” by flight, their microscopic seeds floating from tree to tree. This orchid variety is known for its large, showy flowers. Christopher Clark, associate professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at University of California Riverside, identifies the top bird as possibly a black-throated mango and the bottom as a black-eared fairy. Heade probably mistakenly thought the two were from the same species. Clark also notes that while Heade paints the birds with six tail feathers on either side, all hummingbirds actually have two sets of five.

Heade painted many dozens of similar scenes, most often with varieties of Cattleya orchids, but also several featuring passion flowers (see photo). In these scenes he portrays tropical jungles emerging from gray mist which all but obscures the mountains. These atmospheric effects emphasize the depth of view, setting off the vibrancy of the birds and flowers.

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Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)
Two Green-Breasted Hummingbirds, c. 1863–64

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.53

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

John Gould and H. C. Richter, Discura longicauda from Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Hummingbirds, 1861. Hand-colored lithograph.

This painting is the only confirmed surviving study from The Gems of Brazil series, a group of twenty compositions that Heade planned to publish in a volume devoted to hummingbirds.¹ Heade developed the concept for the project in 1863 during his trip to Brazil, where he secured at least sixty subscribers for the publication and received the endorsement of Emperor Dom Pedro II.² But when Heade left Brazil for London the next year, he struggled to find additional funding for the work. London presented increased competition: John Gould’s Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Hummingbirds had just been completed in 1861, and it contained ample illustrations of the same subjects (see image). The growing British expectation of verisimilitude in natural history illustration also may have clashed with Heade’s fanciful style. Seeking to imply narratives of domestic unity through his avian models, he tended to present pairs of hummingbirds cohabitating near nests with eggs, but he conceded that he had never observed such a moment in real life.³

Perhaps the greatest obstacle that Heade faced was technical. Working with British publishers, he attempted to reproduce his paintings with chromolithography, but the process was costly and did not capture the subtlety of his original colors. A test print of this painting reveals some of the difficulties (see image in entry below). While the colors are vibrant, they notably diverge from those in the original painting, and they show signs of having been retouched by hand, which would have represented an additional expense. Dispirited by these setbacks and out of money, Heade soon gave up his ambition to create his “large and elegant album.”⁴

1. Theodore E. Stebbins, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 284, cat. no. 333.

2. Stebbins, 64.

3. Stebbins, 76.

4. Stebbins, 75.

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

Brazilian Hummingbirds II, c. 1863–64. Chromolithograph, touched with oil, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. One of the four lithographs produced by M. & N. Hanbart.

In the late nineteenth century, artists and naturalists alike turned their attention to the tropics. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was written largely from observations in the Galápagos Islands. South America and the Pacific Islands were seen as laboratories in which evolution would be either proven or debunked. At the time, the practice of natural history focused on the discovery and cataloguing of animal and plant species. Popular illustrated works catalogued flora and fauna by type and region, modeled on Audubon’s successful Birds of America (1827–38).

In this context, Martin Johnson Heade undertook a voyage to Brazil in 1863 with the intent of depicting every South American hummingbird in a book of lithographs to be called The Gems of Brazil. Heade spent almost a year and a half in Rio de Janeiro collecting and painting specimens, sending many of his designs to the London lithography studio M. & N. Hanbart. Heade was disappointed, however, with the quality of Hanbart’s reproductions, particularly the dullness of their color. As a result, the printers produced only four finished lithographs before Heade abandoned the project (see image).

Two Green-Breasted Hummingbirds is one of about two dozen paintings Heade made while in Brazil preparing The Gems of Brazil. These works show the birds either perched in profile or facing forward with wings extended; Heade was not concerned with capturing motion so much as clearly depicting the distinguishing features of the species. The jungle and mountain setting is likely a fabrication, though perhaps based on Heade’s travels to the Serra de Tijuca mountain range.

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Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Grace Hoops, 1872

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.16

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), Soap Bubbles, 1733–34. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This charming image of two girls playing a game in the late afternoon or early evening is one of Homer’s most engaging depictions of youth on the cusp of adulthood, including paintings of games of croquet played on the lawn of his father’s house in Belmont, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. Homer followed then-contemporary ideas of gender; these girls are graceful and genteel, unlike the rough-and-tumble boys playing Snap the Whip (1872).

The jeu des graces was a game invented in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Players try to pass and catch a circular hoop with two sticks, making graceful poses. Play is often a rehearsal for adulthood, and the striving for the ring may signify the desire for marriage or success in life. The hoop is suspended high in the air, with the girl on the right poised to catch it. The passage of time is embodied in this frozen instant, and temporality is also implied by the shadowed time of day, the age of the young women, and the flowers (including bachelor buttons) that surround them in the garden. Like Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (see photo), it is one of many images of the fleeting nature of childhood, a traditional vanitas theme.

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

A wooden ring hangs in the air, paused in its flight between two young women. They are engaged in the “game of graces,” a popular form of nineteenth-century recreation in which players tossed and caught a hoop using a pair of handheld rods. The game, which had arrived in the United States from France, was said to encourage girls to move gracefully.¹ The title of this painting clearly refers to the game, but it may also have been an allusion to the name of the woman in black. She is thought to be Grace Barrett Valentine, who owned Homer’s preliminary sketch for this work (see image), and her brother-in-law, Lawson Valentine, may have purchased the final painting.²

Grace Hoops, 1872. Oil on canvas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Encouraged by affluent patrons such as the Valentines (owners of a major varnish and paint factory in Boston), Homer increasingly painted such scenes of childhood leisure in the 1870s, turning away from the national strife that had been a recurring theme of his work as an artist-reporter during the American Civil War. Even when representing seemingly anodyne subjects, however, Homer maintained the precision and temporal specificity that had established the credibility of his journalistic work. In a period when lengthy photographic exposure times precluded split-second snapshots, Homer’s paintings conveyed a feeling of arrested animation that no camera could achieve. The hard-edged instantaneity of this composition saves it from mere mawkish sentimentality. Homer clearly delights in the fact that the airborne ring suggests a halo above the figures, but he is equally attentive to the physics of the object, refusing to transform it entirely into a saccharine symbol of angelic femininity.

1. For an instructive description, see Lydia Maria Child, The Girl’s Own Book (New York: Clark Austin & Company, 1833), 105–6.

2. Lloyd Goodrich, Record of Works by Winslow Homer, ed. Abigail Booth Gerdts (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005), 2:181–83.

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George Inness (1825–94)
In the Evening, 1866

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.55

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A major figure in the Hudson River school, Inness was one of many artists and writers influenced by the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic. A fundamental principle of Swedenborgianism is that everything in nature corresponds to a spiritual reality. Romantic artists easily extended this mirroring principle to use nature as a vehicle for emotion and symbolic content. Whether realistic or abstract, the artist’s marks on canvas can convey ideas or feelings. The fresh naturalism and broad brushstrokes of this dark and moody landscape also reveal the influence of the French Barbizon school. Seeking simplicity and unity of effect, Inness rejected “elaborateness in detail” as it “did not gain me meaning.” Like James McNeill Whistler, Inness painted from memory to help simplify his forms.

This quiet and intimate landscape reflects Inness’s meditative vision of American nature, particularly significant as a restorative in the aftermath of the Civil War. A seated hunter, perhaps a veteran, cradles a gun on his lap in a shadowy glade as he rests at the end of the day. The subtlety of this work contrasts with the more explicit call for peace in Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field of 1865 (see photo). Although he was unable to enlist due to poor health, Inness paid soldiers who joined the Union cause in his stead.

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

An otherworldly light suffuses a clearing in a dense wood, where a hunter rests on a log. Without any sky visible in the scene, it is difficult to determine the time of day. The black void on the other side of the stream suggests the darkness of night, yet the trees and grass glow with an eerie vibrancy.

Near the Delaware Water Gap, c. 1866. Oil on canvas, private collection.

Such supernatural effects became increasingly important to Inness’s work in the mid-1860s, when he worked within a small community of artists and writers in Eagleswood, New Jersey. Influenced by the painter William Page (1811–85), Inness began to explore Swedenborgian theology, according to which the visible world constituted a veil over the spiritual realm.¹ Building on these ideas, Inness sought to move beyond the empirical study of nature, attempting instead to reveal a divine essence that lay outside of ordinary sensory perception.

The cultivated strangeness of this scene becomes especially apparent when we compare it with a smaller preparatory study that Inness produced for it (see image).² While the study presents a naturalistic representation of a shady wood, the final painting establishes a tension between light and dark that charges the landscape with a paranormal atmosphere.

1. Michael Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 1:175–76.

2. Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Christie’s, New York, Thurs., Dec. 2, 2004, lot 38. Identified as a likely study for In the Evening in Quick, George Inness, 1:266.

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John Frederick Kensett (1816–72)
On the Beverly Coast, 1865

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.21

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: Mingo Beach, Beverly, Massachusetts, March 11, 2022, at low tide. Photograph: Jeffery Howe.
Bottom: Bash-Bish Falls, Massachusetts, 1855. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

John Frederick Kensett was a leading luminist artist, influenced by nineteenth-century Transcendentalism. His precise and accurate style was shaped by his early training as an engraver. This almost abstract vision of the rocky shore of Beverly, Massachusetts, depicts the Atlantic Ocean and horizon cloaked in a luminous mist. This evanescent realm of light and color is balanced by the harsh clarity of a rocky promontory with low trees at right. The stilled sea and split rocks have an elegiac undertone of calm after a storm, perhaps a metaphor for the end of the Civil War and desire for peace. The golden light of the distant sea also suggests a hope for freedom, transcending the burdens of earthly life.

Beverly was a popular summer resort at this time, called by some the “Riviera of Massachusetts.” Kensett often sketched at the nearby summer estate of Charles Greeley Loring, later trustee and director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and completed more than twenty paintings of the area. Loring’s estate (now demolished, near the site of Endicott College) faced a trio of beaches, one of which has an intriguing history. According to local historians, Mingo Beach (see photo) was named for Robin Mingo, an African American or Native American enslaved person owned by Thomas Woodberry. Legend has it that Mingo was promised his freedom if a rare low tide ever made it possible to walk to a distant off-shore rock, an event that unfortunately only occurred in the year he died (1748).

A further association of this locale with themes of freedom is found in the tradition that this beach was used as an escape route for those accused of witchcraft in nearby Salem; a local path is still called Witches Lane. Kensett chose scenes that were not only visually and geologically interesting, but had historic resonance. He painted Bash-Bish Falls in the Berkshires several times; the Falls were named for a Native American woman named Bash-Bish who had been condemned to death at that site (see image).

John Sallis
Frederick J. Adelmann, SJ Professor, Philosophy

Early in his career Kensett traveled extensively in Europe, moving between London and Paris and settling for a period in Italy. When finally he decided to return to the United States, he expressed his desire in these words: he wanted “to get amid the scenery” of his own country, for, as he said, “it abounds with the picturesque, the grand, and the beautiful.” Upon his return, he set about painting scenes of the marshlands of coastal New England, as well as landscapes along the Hudson River, at Niagara Falls, in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. He established his reputation as the master of American luminism, a style that emphasizes smooth, seamless surfaces of light. Kensett alludes to a kind of luminism in a journal entry that reads: “the simplicity of strength and knowledge.” This expressionism is exemplified in a work such as On the Beverly Coast. In this painting much of the surface depicts water and sky; the work displays such simplicity that only the slightest shading betrays the division between sea and sky. A sense of strength is conveyed by the rocks, which are securely anchored. One can readily imagine that arboreal figure that backs them is a tree of knowledge, toward which the two human figures at the extreme right appear to be walking across a stony ledge, its color mirroring that of the large stone in the foreground of the painting.

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Fitz Henry Lane (1804–65)
Sunset after a Storm, 1858

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.19

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

The Burning of the Packet Ship “Boston,” 1830. Watercolor, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester.

The “storm-tossed boat” is one of the classic motifs of Romantic art, and was frequently depicted by artists such as Robert Salmon and J. M. W. Turner. Lane’s first known painting was a watercolor, The Burning of the Packet Ship “Boston,” 1830 (see photo). The image of a ship in peril evoked themes of the “voyage of life” and its risks and opportunities. Art historian Barbara Novak links Lane to the Transcendentalists of New England: “I have always held that Lane is the painter whose works best parallel many of Emerson’s most deeply felt dicta. He is the American Transcendental painter…. ‘It is not words only that are emblematic,’ Emerson wrote in Nature, ‘it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.’”

The storm has passed in this painting, and the pink-tinged sky of the sunset promises better weather. The massive waves and dramatic rocking tilt of the ship attest to the force of nature. Lane’s harbor scenes denote peace and tranquility, but the open sea represents a sublime power that challenges sailors and their ships. The painting could also be a metaphor for a person transcending internal emotional turmoil.

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Fitz Henry Lane (1804–65)
View of Gloucester Harbor, 1858

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.20

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: Fitz Henry Lane house, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1848–49. Bottom: Gloucester Harbor from Rocky Neck, March 25, 2022. Photographs: Jeffery Howe.

Although a leading luminist painter, the artist’s name has been confused by historians. Born Nathaniel Rogers Lane in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1804, he legally changed his name to Fitz Henry Lane in 1831. In the twentieth century he was mistakenly identified as Fitz Hugh Lane, although recent discoveries have corrected this. In 1832 he moved to Boston, where he was influenced by the work of Robert Salmon and practiced the relatively new art of lithography. In 1848 he moved back to Gloucester to a house he designed with a top floor studio for panoramic views of the harbor (see photo). Lane was paralyzed as a child, probably by infantile polio, and was obliged to use crutches. Nonetheless, he became one of the most skilled maritime artists of his time. His style was very precise and detailed, leading to speculation that he may have used a camera lucida, an optical device for projecting images.

View of Gloucester Harbor shows the outlook from a small promontory on Rocky Neck, with the distinctive Black Rock Spindle navigational aid in the foreground. Rocky Neck became the site of a vibrant artists’ colony that persists to this day. A variety of large vessels and smaller craft attest to the success of the fishing port. The soft glow of the sky veils the cityscape in the distance, and is reflected on the still surface of the harbor. The silhouette of the Spindle and the clearly defined ships in the middleground create visual interest against the backdrop of a thriving coastal community.

Conevery Bolton Valencius
Professor, History

Fitz Henry Lane depicts sunset glow on the sails and water of busy Gloucester Harbor, north of Boston, before the Civil War. This painting captures not just the end of a day, but of an era. Eighteen-fifty-eight was one year before entrepreneurs began pumping petroleum from beneath northwest Pennsylvania, in a commercial and scientific development of world significance. Coal-powered steam engines had already begun to remake transportation. Within decades, commercial sailing vessels would all but vanish: by World War I, most working boats ran on coal or oil. Gone, too, the wooden cage-like structure in the foreground, a post lantern, one of many marking rocky outcrops and channel openings in harbors such as Gloucester. Fueled by whale oil and later kerosene, post lanterns became obsolete in an era of electrical illumination. This image of calm waters portrays a world about to be upended not only by the cataclysm of war, but by the transformative power of fossil fuels.

With thanks to maritime historian Dr. Lisa Mighetto for insights on post lanterns and to Boston College students in the “Powering America” Complex Problems Core Class for inspiring discussions of US energy history.

Owen Stanwood
Professor, History

Fitz Henry Lane’s painting of Gloucester Harbor is not just a New England scene, but a powerful depiction of the region’s connections with the wider world. Dozens of ships sit anchored in a busy harbor, bringing the world’s goods to Gloucester. The large brig in the middle of the painting may very well have come from Suriname, perhaps the most important trading destination for Gloucester merchants like the Babson family, who commissioned Lane to paint one of their brigs, the Cadet, in 1844. A Dutch colony on the northern coast of South America, Suriname had links to New England that stretched back over a century, recorded in John Greenwood’s famous mid-eighteenth-century painting of Rhode Island merchants “carousing” in a Suriname tavern, served in their revelries by two enslaved Africans (see image).

John Greenwood (1727–92), Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname, c. 1755–58. Oil on bed ticking, Saint Louis Art Museum.

By the nineteenth century Gloucester had supplanted Boston and Newport as a primary node in the Suriname trade. The town’s merchants made the four-month journey in ships filled with salt cod that would serve as provisions for the thousands of enslaved people on Surinamese plantations, known as some of the most lucrative, and brutal, in the Americas. The ships returned to Gloucester with molasses to be turned into rum in New England’s distilleries. Thus, the painting gestures to the central role of enslaved African laborers in powering the region’s economy, even on the eve of America’s Civil War.

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Robert Salmon (1775–c. 1845)
View of Boston Harbor, Ship Going Out, 1832

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.22

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Top: Fort Independence, Castle Island, Boston, April 22, 2022. Photograph: Jeffery Howe. Bottom: Red flag with white cross, insignia of the B. C. Clarke & Co., detail of painting, Private Signals of the Merchants of Boston, Mass., c. 1850. Oil on canvas, Mariners Museum & Park, Newport News.

Robert Salmon was one of the most prolific maritime artists of his time, painting nearly one thousand works. The richness of his light effects links him to the luminist movement (1825–75). Salmon was born in England, but lived in Boston from 1828 until 1840. His small home on Marine Railway Wharf in the North End overlooked the very active Boston Harbor. In this painting Salmon depicts a number of large commercial vessels in full sail, leaning from the strong winds as they head out into the Atlantic Ocean. Salmon’s detailed nautical knowledge is evident in the rigging of the tall ships and the variety of small craft that populate the harbor.

Fort Independence is seen in the right background. This bastion fort was originally built by the British in the seventeenth century, and was first known as Castle William. It was rebuilt after the Revolutionary War, and renamed Fort Independence in 1797. The current granite structure was constructed in 1833–51 (see photo). A symbol of American independence, it echoes the American flag conspicuously shown on the nearest tall ship. The ship also flies a prominent red flag with white cross. This is the house flag for B. C. Clark & Co. (see image), a noted shipping company in Boston that was engaged in the West India Trade, principally with Cape Haytien (Haiti) for coffee, as well as for Mediterranean fruit and wine. B. C. Clark & Co. also participated in the slave trade in Brazil, according to contemporary British anti-slavery journals. Although no name is visible, this ship could be their brig Water Witch, built in 1831.

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Aaron Shikler (1922–2015)
Study for the White House Portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, 1968

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.56

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Top: Vermeil Room, White House. Bottom: Early Study for White House Portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, 1968 (location unknown).

Trained at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and then in New York under the renowned German-born abstract painter Hans Hoffman (1880–1966), Aaron Shikler built a career painting portraits, in what he saw as a European representational style. Among his sitters were many well-known politicians and social elites, including Charles de Gaulle, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Gloria Vanderbilt. He also painted a lifesize portrait in grisaille of Jacqueline Kennedy for which this is a late preliminary oil sketch. Unveiled in 1971, the final painting (see image, below) hangs in the Vermeil Room of the White House (see image) not far from Shikler’s posthumous portrait of her husband, John F. Kennedy (see image, below) in the Cross Hall. Jacqueline Kennedy had previously commissioned Shikler to complete pastel portraits of her children Caroline and John and of the three of them, for which several studies also exist.

In an earlier sketch for the White House portrait (see image), which Kennedy is said to have vetoed as too “girlish and intense,” Shikler shows her in a frontal pose wearing the flared skirt and blouse with a bow in which she posed for him in her New York apartment. By the stage in which he made the McMullen’s preliminary study, Shikler extended the blouse to the floor and turned her head to give her a slimmer profile and to make her appear more elegant and less “angry” after the recent assassination of her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy. Shikler commented that he attempted to capture “the haunted look in her eyes” and the tension in her hands that belied her calm restraint.

Kay L. Schlozman
J. Joseph Moakley Professor, Political Science

Top: Portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, 1970. Bottom: Portrait of John F. Kennedy, 1970. Oils on canvas, White House Collection/White House Historical Association, Washington, DC.

Standing in front of the fireplace in her Fifth Avenue apartment, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy wears an ethereal, diaphanous, long gown in this study for the official portrait (see image) that now hangs in the White House’s Vermeil Room (see photo, above). (The dress was supposedly fictional. When she posed, she wore a skirt with the blouse that is pictured.) Whether—as it has alternately been described—her expression is sad, mysterious, pensive, or intense, she is unambiguously beautiful.

Portraits of first ladies vary in terms of how the subject is posed, how she is dressed, and whether, as this one does, the painting reveals anything about her inner life. No other first lady emerges as simultaneously so feminine and so psychologically complicated as Kennedy.

It is interesting to compare the portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy with the one that Shikler did posthumously of her husband (see image). John Kennedy is pictured, in isolation without props or background, arms folded and head bowed, deeply contemplative, bearing the weight of his responsibilities as leader of the Free World.

It is perhaps even more interesting to compare the first lady portraits, taken together, with those of the presidents. Whether they are smiling or reflective, whether their attire is formal and opulent (Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison), elegant (Nancy Reagan in a portrait also by Shikler), or simple (Rosalyn Carter), whether they are unadorned or sport jewelry (Melania Trump’s ring is notable), whether petting a dog (Grace Goodhue Coolidge) or holding a purse (a sixty-something Mamie Doud Eisenhower decked out for the prom), anyone not in the know would be hard pressed to identify what this group of women has in common is their position as first ladies. Eleanor Roosevelt—pencil in hand, an open book in front of her—is the only one captured actually doing something.

In contrast, the presidential portraits convey seriousness of purpose and project power. Like the JFK portrait, those of a care-worn Abraham Lincoln and a deeply thoughtful Franklin Roosevelt especially communicate the burdens assumed by a president in a time of crisis. Like Zachary Taylor after him, George Washington grasps his sword. John Quincy Adams has his forefinger in a book, presumably keeping his place as he is interrupted in the act of reading. Herbert Hoover and George H. W. Bush are each pictured in front of a globe. George W. Bush’s hand rests on a chair upholstered with the presidential seal. Unlike any of the first ladies, numerous presidents are pictured with papers, sometimes in their hands.

When we finally elect a female president, how will she be depicted in her official portrait?

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John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Study of a Fig Tree, 1908

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.18

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Painted in Majorca in 1908, this study is no simple botanical illustration. Green and yellow fig leaves undulate across the brown background, forming an almost abstract arabesque. Sargent had become increasingly interested in decorative abstraction while in Spain, where he admired the ornamental tilework present in Jewish and Islamic architecture.¹

The Messianic Era, 1916. Oil on canvas, Boston Public Library.

Sargent ultimately incorporated elements of this painting into a mural celebrating the emergence of Christianity, The Messianic Era (see image), which constituted part of his larger Triumph of Religion cycle in the Boston Public Library. He was planning The Messianic Era while in Spain in 1908, and he took advantage of the trip to capture Mediterranean foliage for his Boston mural.² In the final work, a cluster of fig leaves appears interlaced with pomegranate plants in the background, floating to the right of the blond and fair messiah. While Sargent was careful to examine authentic Mediterranean flora for the mural, he nonetheless adhered to period assumptions in deciding that Christ needed to have the features of a Northern European.³

1. Sarah Cash, Sargent and Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 107–11.

2. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 73; Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 343n95.

3. Sally M. Promey, “Sargent’s Truncated Triumph: Art and Religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890–1925,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 2 (1997): 217–50, 244.

Gregory Fried
Professor, Philosophy

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

El Jaleo, 1882. Oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Compared to large-scale portraits like Madame X that secured Sargent’s fame and success (see image), this painting of leaves on a fig tree in Majorca, Spain, in 1908, is a mere study. It appears free and uninhibited by any need to please a client. With a squint of the eyes, the composition seems a deliberately abstract study of color and shape, while at the same time, the impasto of the brushwork so richly evokes the leaves, like icing generously heaped with a knife onto a cake. Sargent therefore bridges the abstract and the utterly specific in this work, perhaps a metaphor for how he felt about Spain—that he wanted to gobble up the country’s forms, colors, sounds, and movements, as in his extraordinary El Jaleo (see image), a depiction of a Romani Spanish dancer ecstatically performing a flamenco dance to guitars, signing, and rapturous applause. But, in the fig leaves, he treats us to the very smells and tastes of a fig orchard, which we share with him.

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John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.17

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

In his 1903 guide to Greece, the American archaeologist Rufus Byam Richardson advised readers that only “the painter’s art seems adequate to report Corfu.”¹ A stroll through the olive groves on this island in the Ionian Sea left Richardson with the feeling of “intoxication without wine.” It would take an artist, Richardson thought, to record “this realm of beauty brought upon the retina.”

Albanian Olive Gatherers, 1909. Oil on canvas, City Art Gallery, Manchester.

John Singer Sargent traveled to Corfu six years later, ready to do his part. He spent more than a month on the island, making numerous paintings of its famed olive groves.² Corfu had attracted attention for its abundance of olive trees since the age of Homer, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the island had emerged as one of the world’s leading producers of olive oil (the harvest in 1909 was estimated to be 18,000 tons).³ But Sargent, like Richardson, concerns himself less with industry and trade than with subjective experience, painting tree trunks and branches with calligraphic swirls that convey the artist’s own intoxication with the landscape. The trees, more than the two figures who pass beneath them, constitute the painting’s main protagonists, their undulating limbs expressing as much personality as any human.

Sargent’s other paintings from Corfu occasionally touch upon the practicalities of the island’s economy. One notable example shows the migrant workers from Albania who performed much of the labor required to harvest the olives (see image). Even here, though, it is the arboreal figures that dominate the composition, their gnarled bodies and weathered surfaces indicating that they are the ultimate witnesses to this majestic landscape.

1. Rufus Byam Richardson, Vacation Days in Greece (London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 3.

2. For Sargent’s time in Corfu, see Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 81–83.

3. George Raymond, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of Corfu for the Year 1909,” in Diplomatic and Consular Reports (London: Foreign Office and the Board of Trade, 1910), 3.

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Permanent Collection Index

Francis Augustus Silva (1835–86)
Approaching Storm, 1871

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.57

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

William Trost Richards, Coast of New Jersey, 1870. Oil on canvas, Davis Museum, Wellesley College.

Born in New York City, Silva was essentially self-taught as an artist. As a young man, he was apprenticed to a sign painter and opened his own shop at age twenty-three. Silva served in the Civil War and became a captain in the New York State Militia’s Seventh Cavalry. Influenced by the Hudson River school and the luminists, he specialized in landscapes and seascapes. His earliest known painting is titled Cape Ann. In 1880, he moved to the seacoast resort town of Long Branch, New Jersey. The location of this scene is unknown.

Approaching Storm shows a variety of vessels off the coast as a rainstorm moves in. Although most are sail-powered, a distant steam ship is found near the center of the canvas. The contrast of old and new generations of technology is heightened by the skeletal frame of a small ship pulled partly onto the shore. The horizon is low, and the dramatic clouds are balanced by a shadowed promontory at left. The wrecked hull is at the end of its life, while the boat at anchor and sailing ships and steamboat embody different stages of life and progress. The motif of wrecked ships appealed to many artists such as William Trost Richards (1833–1905), who similarly combined realism with a Romantic theme of the transience of life (see image). The coming storm is no hurricane—the seas are calm—but a part of the cycles of nature. Silva’s seascapes are seemingly modest, but he insisted that “a picture should be more than a skillfully painted canvas; —it must tell something.”

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Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
Farewell to Mayo, 1929

Oil on paper
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.23

Kevin Lotery
Assistant Professor, Art History

Though known primarily as a painter, Jack B. Yeats devoted large portions of his career to writing and illustrating. He got his start as a jobbing illustrator and designer before taking up painting around the turn of the century, followed by periods given over to writing plays. The resulting oeuvre of paintings, works on paper, and texts, extending past the end of the Second World War, speaks to an ethos of disciplinary and generational cross-fertilization, nourished at least in part by a family of artists and writers, which included his father, painter John Butler Yeats and his elder siblings: embroiderer Susan Mary Yeats, publisher Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, and poet William Butler Yeats. A literary, even theatrical, sensibility underlies even Yeats’s most painterly projects, such as Farewell to Mayo, which stages, self-consciously, the drama of a passing moment for us, their spectators, granting access to a scene of dislocation and loss. Here two figures, a traveler and a coach man, look back, Orpheus-like, at the spectator, who now stands in ambiguous relation to the home to which they are forever in the process of bidding “farewell.” Are we remaining in County Mayo, whose famous cliffs we see crudely depicted on the horizon? Or are we merely passersby, witnesses to a process of leaving? Like Yeats’s two figures, it seems that we too are dislocated by the painting, such that the act of looking is endowed with something of the disorientation of leaving the comforts of home.

The Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), a key observer of Yeats’s work, may have had such scenes in mind when he wrote that the painter “[sends] us back to the darkest part of the spirit that created it,” refusing romantic clichés of home or of “heritage, national or otherwise.”¹ While the work seems to call up the pathos of loss and leaving, as if to transport spectators from the historical specificities of Irish country life to some mythical, allegorical domain outside of time, it does so only to expose any such attempt as an illusory performance, staged in paint.

It may only be a coincidence that the painting was once owned by Vivien Leigh, the Oscar-winning actress who played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), that most repressive, romanticizing Technicolor spectacle of the institutionalized horrors of the American plantation system. Opposed to such nativist nostalgia, Yeats’s picture presents figures forever in the act of saying “farewell” to the viewer across the unbridgeable divide of the picture frame. They are, in other words, Beckettian wanderers to the core, trapped forever by the stage or by the effects of the frame. Loss, trauma, erasure: rather than mere narrative or allegorical content, these forces are, as in Beckett’s plays, the structuring conditions of Yeats’s work. In scenes like this, then, we might locate a peculiar critique of essentializing, nativist understandings of home, showing them to be mythic scenes animated not by pathos but by mere matter, pushed around on a surface.

1. Samuel Beckett, “Homage to Jack B. Yeats” (April 1954), in Jack B. Yeats: A Celtic Visionary, ed. Howard Smith and Stephen Snoddy (Manchester: City Art Galleries, 1996), n.p.

Gone with the

Robert Savage
Professor, History & Irish Studies

Seán Keating (1889–1977), Economic Pressure, 1949. Oil on board, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

In spite of Ireland’s gaining independence, in the early decades of the twentieth century emigration continued to haunt the country. The west of the island was especially impacted by a relentless “flight from the land” as many young women and men felt compelled to leave home in search of work and a better life. Yeats captures the emotion of the emigration experience in Farewell to Mayo, a painting that mirrors Seán Keating’s iconic Economic Pressure from two decades later (see image). Keating’s realist painting captures the emotional toll of emigration on Irish society by depicting a man embracing his mother before leaving his home in the Aran Islands. Unlike Keating, Yeats paints in the expressionist style. There is no escaping the raw emotions in the figures that confront the viewer. The faces and body language of the men with shoulders slumped and faces drawn suggests resignation and despair. Yeats’s painting speaks to the economic and social challenges that confronted independent Ireland through much of the twentieth century.

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

Jack Yeats retained this large painting in his personal collection until 1942 when he lent it to the National Gallery in London for an exhibition curated by the Gallery’s director, Sir Kenneth Clark. During the run of the exhibition, Clark invited the actress Vivien Leigh, whom he often visited in her dressing room at the nearby Haymarket Theatre, for a private tour. Seeing Yeats’s painting of an emigrant and driver in a one-horse cart leaving Mayo for America with a reddened sky in the background reminded Leigh of her escape, in a similar horse drawn cart, from a burning Atlanta when she played the shrewd and calculating Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, for which she won an Academy Award. Leigh had vacationed in Ireland as a child; her mother had Irish roots and her father was buried in Mayo. The painting resonated so deeply with Leigh that her husband, the famous British actor and director Sir Laurence Olivier, bought it for her after the exhibition from Yeats’s dealer, Victor Waddington. The painting remained in Leigh’s estate until it was sold to Carolyn and Peter Lynch at Sotheby’s in London in 1996.

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Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
Rushing Waters, 1947

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2021.24

Kevin Lotery
Assistant Professor, Art History

Jack Butler Yeats was a famously independent painter who never aligned himself with any school or avant-garde, despite having lived through periods of great innovation in both modern painting and avant-garde culture. As the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906–89) declared in his homage to the painter, Yeats was “incomparable,” his “great solitary oeuvre” resisting the art historian’s desire for easy comparison.¹ A painting like Rushing Waters might, for example, remind us of the German expressionist tactic of investing the bare, naive application of paint with erotic charge or political agitation. Alternatively, it might call up postwar painters like Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, or Francis Bacon, whose brutal paintings, contemporaneous with Rushing Waters, also invited spectators into scenographies of bodily disfiguration and painterly dispersal, stilled forever by the fact of having been painted.

But as Beckett noted enigmatically, Yeats’s marks were too “dispassionate” for all that, and in late works like Rushing Waters the painter’s icy, “inhuman” dispassion takes center stage.² Here, we are given an image of a lone figure lacking interiority, its boundaries dissolving into mere pigment, like mud and water running down a surface. One is reminded of the key understanding of “late work” as articulated by German Jewish thinker Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) in 1937. Adorno sees an artist’s final works not so much as a coherent composition but as mere aesthetic matter that has departed and abstracted itself from the hand of the aging “master” who created it.³ In an artist’s late works, then, marks no longer “express” but revert to “masses of material” that only occasionally follow the painter’s commands.⁴

In Rushing Waters, Yeats shows the human subject in the process of being exiled from the comforts and pleasures of painting, whether its genres (landscape, the portrait) or its privileged skills (drawing, modeling, the construction of perspectival space). It seems that the human figure, that most privileged subject of Western art and culture, is no longer at home in the space of painting, where it had long been celebrated and contemplated. Instead, it finds itself back in the muck, on the verge of decomposition. Beckett of course described it best, seeing in Yeats’s work not the pathos of the individual, independent subject defining itself against nature (or in paint) but rather the base materiality of all things: “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness.”⁵

1. Samuel Beckett, “Homage to Jack B. Yeats” (April 1954), in Jack B. Yeats: A Celtic Visionary, ed. Howard Smith and Stephen Snoddy (Manchester: City Art Galleries, 1996), n.p.

2. Quoted in Colm Tóibín, “The Unmapped Space: Memory in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett,” in Jack B. Yeats: Painting and Memory, ed. Donal Maguire and Brendan Rooney (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2021), 21. See also Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

3. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 567.

4. Adorno, 566.

5. Beckett, quoted in Tóibín, “Unmapped Space,” 21.

Vera Kreilkamp
Professor, Irish Studies

Rushing Waters was created in 1947, the year that Jack Yeats’s wife of fifty-three years, Cottie Yeats, died. Using the white of the canvas and a subdued and gloomy palette, Yeats painted an apparition-like figure sitting on an outcropping of rock, a book raised to his face to read. A stream rushes from behind and around the figure, spilling out into the viewers’ space and moves off to the right. Light bathes the figure and the stream; the rest is framed in a darkness sparingly inflected with whites and yellows. In the characteristically expressionist and symbolist style of his late period, Yeats seems to juxtapose Ireland’s literature and its western landscape tradition, both of which are deeply rooted within him and his family. The viewers of the painting may themselves be privy to the landscape described in the reader’s book.

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Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
Quiet Men, 1946

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.61

Kevin Lotery
Assistant Professor, Art History

Painted during Jack B. Yeats’s productive later years, Quiet Men evinces an artist clearly focused on exploring, and ultimately undermining, the discipline of painting, its most privileged genres, materials, and techniques. The work likely depicts a line of solitary figures, taking up their daily posts on the benches of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin.¹ Performing a more or less common ritual at the time, these quiet figures could, from this vantage, take in the everyday life of their city and no doubt ponder, like Ulysses (1922) protagonist Leopold Bloom, the intersection of the banal and the epic. A fellow Irish writer and theorist of exile and dislocation, James Joyce (1882–1941) was in fact one of Yeats’s most abiding admirers. “Jack Yeats and I have the same method,” he once supposedly stated, cryptically.² What is meant here by “method” remains an enigma, but we might offer some guesses by looking closely at Yeats’s surfaces, where representation finds itself given over to the abstract materiality of paint, performing microscopic interactions of color, liquidity, and canvas.

These materialist explorations possess a critical edge, as if to negate and refuse painting’s most privileged act, the application of paint to canvas. The British critic John Berger (1926–2017) once speculated that Yeats may have, at times, abandoned the hallowed tool of the easel painter, the paintbrush, in favor of simply smearing paint onto canvas directly from the tubes themselves, using the “nozzle” as a means of mark-making.³ Yeats, then, brought his painterly degradation both to the tools and to the very hand of the painter—that privileged seat of academic skill and personal expression. Negating it in favor of the commoditized, ready-made tube of paint, Yeats’s marks separate themselves from the hand of the master, declaring themselves as mere matter, no more or less privileged than the wet mud or dispersing fog that we see in Quiet Men. This is classic Bloom, whose epic journey unfolds over the course of a single, banal summer’s day in Dublin. Finding himself formed and reformed by a collage of literary styles spanning the history of the English language, Bloom moves from human protagonist to microscopic “speck” to mere emanation of linguistic material. At his core, Bloom is an absence, like the barely pigmented nothingness at the center of Yeats’s picture.

1. See Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol. 3 (London: Deutsch, 1992), 670.

2. Quoted in Colm Tóibín, Colm Tóibín, “The Unmapped Space: Memory in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett,” in Jack B. Yeats: Painting and Memory, ed. Donal Maguire and Brendan Rooney (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2021), 19. See also Richard Ellman, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 715.

3. John Berger, “The Life & Death of an Artist” (1960), in Jack B. Yeats: A Celtic Visionary, ed. Howard Smith and Stephen Snoddy (Manchester: City Art Galleries, 1996), n.p.

Marjorie Howes
Associate Professor, English & Irish Studies

His childhood in the West of Ireland gave Jack Yeats the subject matter that dominated his artistic life. His representations of rural people he saw there often invite conflicting interpretations. He was sympathetic to Irish republicanism, both before and after the War of Independence, and some observers have suggested that Yeats, like certain members of the Irish Literary Revival, had a tendency to idealize the Irish peasantry. Others have argued that his work emphasizes the mystery and dignity of his subjects and foregrounds the difficulties of representation. This enigmatic expressionist oil from his later period embodies such ambiguity. The title may invoke Maurice Walsh’s short story “The Quiet Man,” which was first published in 1933 and became famous for its depiction of an Irish countryman as the strong, silent type who is capable of explosive violent action. It was later adapted into John Ford’s iconic film The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. The “quiet men” in this painting can be interpreted along these lines as Irish people, even Irish revolutionaries, whose stillness belies their capacity for movement or violence. On the other hand, they are consigned to the margins of the scene and threaten to disappear into the similarly colored background or fall out of the frame altogether. The center of the painting is both filled with light, in contrast to the darkness of the men, and eerily empty, suggesting limits on what the viewer can see.

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Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
L’homme barbu (Bearded Man), n.d.

Pencil and white pigment on paper
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.59

Kevin Lotery
Assistant Professor, Art History

Not much is known about Pablo Picasso’s undated little pencil drawing. It ostensibly depicts a bearded, wild-eyed man in harsh frontal view, his gaze locked on us, his spectators. Lacking any modeling, the face is flattened against the sheet, its beard delineated by a looping and arching contour line that also bounds the great hat above. Lightly highlighted with white pigment of some kind, this absurd headdress may represent a chef’s toque, though its morphology—and its ambiguous relation to the mesmeric face below—remains open to the viewer’s interpretation. The comical, even grotesque caricature possesses no neck that might connect it to a body outside of the frame; it is, instead, a being wholly a product of the page itself, which tightly bounds both head and hat a single, autonomous unit. The physiognomy is constructed by a carefully choreographed collection of calligraphic spirals and decorative arabesques, which unfold like handwriting across the sheet.

Indeed, the artist not-so-subtly disguises his signature amongst these so that it operates both as the authorial mark of the master and as a mere ornamental detail. Denied pride of place, it is endowed with no more or less privilege than any of the other glyph-like fragments surrounding it. Like individual phonemes in the artist’s visual language, they are all allowed to exist both as individual calligraphic units, but also as elements within the larger whole of the head and hat. We see, in other words, how a spiral might come to signify “eye” only by virtue of its relationship to neighboring curlicues (“eyebrows”) or the central U-shape (“nose”).

At the same time, these individual units are free, in part, to perform other anatomical formations, erotically sliding between individual bodily fragments and complete face. While we might search for a specific subject here (whether man, minotaur, or mad hatter), we would be better served by locking our eyes on the hypnotic gaze, letting our vision be caught in the endlessly spiraling madness of signification itself.

Eileen Sweeney
Professor, Philosophy

Pablo Picasso’s L’homme barbu forces the viewer to smile both at the humor of its exaggerated headpiece (a chef’s toque?), hair, and beard, but also at the virtuosity of the simple drawing. Many lines are long and unbroken; others are short squiggles that magically convey so much—not just shape but also mood and feeling. Single lines create the beard, hair, eyes, eyebrows, and hat, versus the mismatched squiggles on the hat and around the eyes and nose. Here Picasso displays his autonomy as artist, his engagement in pure play in his creation of a character out of whole cloth. Here less is emphatically more, illustrating the power of abstraction to make something more real, leaving out all but the barest line. This Picasso drawing, unlike his cubist paintings and collages, does not convey multiple sides and dimensions on a flat surface. Rather, with only a few lines, Picasso suggests a chef with lion-like beard and hair, palpable and alive even though transparent.

“Modern” art and modernism put an emphasis on the autonomy of art and the artist’s freedom from tradition and cultural norms. The modern artist rejects traditional artistic conventions, like realism and perspective, as well as cultural, especially bourgeois, expectations around, for example, class and sexuality as well as beauty. The motto of modern art, “art for art’s sake” asserts that art does not serve religion or morality; it aims to replace and displace both; art is only about itself and the artist is answerable only to himself. If we think about Kant’s view of the tremendous power of the mind to effectively “construct” reality, to synthesize and organize the blooming buzzing onslaught of sense data, we can see in the artist the figure to de-construct and create a new reality—Picasso once described his pictures as “a sum of destructions.” Thus, perhaps no other artist embodies that power more paradigmatically than Picasso, exhibiting endless creativity, breaking multiple times even with his own style, playing with reality in new ways. For the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), following Kant, “play” or the play drive, is our most human activity; play mediates between the mind which transcends time and space, and the empirical, sensible self, immersed in matter. Picasso’s freedom to create transcends the material world and even his own art, but his sensuality places him firmly in the realm of flesh and blood.

Lynch Collection Index

Permanent Collection Index

The twenty-seven paintings and three works on paper from the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection in the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, represent a small portion of the vast and wide-ranging collection of primarily American paintings and decorative arts that the Lynches assembled between the 1960s and Carolyn’s passing in 2015.¹

Dating from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these spectacular gifts by twenty of the era’s most prominent artists, for which the McMullen is most grateful to Carolyn and Peter Lynch and their family were selected to enhance the educational and research mission of Boston College. That goal is furthered in this mobile guide by contributions from the University’s professors in a range of disciplines who volunteered to write interpretive labels. For example, the Lynch Collection’s outstanding landscapes by artists like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, notable for their artistic excellence and art historical significance, also repay careful study by ecocritical viewers of what they reveal about the relationship between the artists’ visions and the American landscape during a period of population growth, industrial development, and westward expansion. Several seascapes and landscapes, especially those by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Fitz Henry Lane, Robert Salmon, and William Bradford, offer latent evidence about global trade and the role of artists as explorers and archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

Martin Johnson Heade’s paintings of orchids and hummingbirds invite viewers to explore blurred boundaries between artists and naturalists traveling to South America in the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and to study innovative workshop practices devised to meet increasing demand in a competitive American market for landscapes. Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt entice viewers to ponder concepts of gender, childhood, and motherhood. Jack Butler Yeats’s paintings provoke through his expressionist technique reconsideration of the trauma of emigration from Ireland, life in the nascent Republic of Ireland, and their resonance in Irish literature.

We hope that viewers will find the labels here helpful in sparking their own dialogue with works of art as they tour the collection and that as Boston College faculty teach from this collection they will contribute new insights from their extensive areas of expertise in the form of additional labels to this digital resource.

1. For a history of the Lynch Collection see Dean Lahikainen, ed., A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection, Peabody Essex Museum (Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2019).

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director, McMullen Museum and Professor, Art History

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William James Glackens (1870–1938)
Sailing Boats, Paris, c. 1895

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2019.5

John McCoy
Assistant Director, McMullen Museum

Top: Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), The Boating Party, 1893–94. Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Bottom: Georges Seurat (1859–91), The River Seine at La Grande-Jatte, 1888. Oil on canvas, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

While William Glackens is considered one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art, only a fraction of his output falls under that style. The Ashcan school was a group of early twentieth-century American realist painters who depicted common scenes of life in New York city’s poorer neighborhoods. The painter George Bellows, also represented in this gallery, is associated with this school as well. Glackens’s early output often featured dark, somber palettes to accompany his urban, documentarian subjects. But after 1910 and for the rest of his life, his palette became colorful and idiosyncratic, inspired by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and his subject matter turned to middle-class leisure, landscapes, and nudes.

Sailing Boats, Paris, was painted when Glackens was twenty-five. The young artist, who had been working as a newspaper illustrator and taking evening courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, traveled to Europe in 1895. There he studied Old Masters in Holland and new works by impressionists and post-impressionists in France. In Paris he spent the following year renting a studio with fellow Ashcan painter Robert Henri, who was also immersing himself in new painting styles. It was during this stay that Glackens painted Sailing Boats, which shows the strong influence of the artists he was studying, with its lively overlapping brush strokes, subjective colors, and its abstracted depiction of leisure. The dark but saturated colors make the time and weather of the scene ambiguous, and anticipate those that Glackens would use in his yet-to-come Ashcan works.

To a viewer today, scenes of boating in fin-de-siècle Paris may seem nostalgic and quaint. Glackens’s intention, however, was to depict a commonplace, contemporary activity. By the 1890s, pleasure-boating was no longer limited to gentry and had been adopted by the growing middle class; the Seine was often crowded with small, relatively inexpensive craft. Boating scenes were favorites of impressionists and post-impressionists (see images). In this painting, Glackens takes an expansive view of both river and shoreline, teeming with dozens of figures. The two central sailboats are sloops, the most basic (and economical) of sailing craft, having two sails and a single mast. Ashore in the foreground, the clientele of a riverside cafe dine both indoors and out, seated at circular tables. The mass of unidentifiable, abstract figures spills into the middle ground where they press against the riverbank, many watching the boats. The lighting makes it unclear if this is a day or night scene, creating a dreamlike space.

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McMullen Museum of Art
Permanent Collection

John Frederick Kensett (1816–72)
A View of Niagara Falls, 1854

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26 in recognition of a life of service to Boston College by William M. & Alison S. Vareika ’74, P’09, ’15, LP’16 on the occasion of William’s Fiftieth Boston College Reunion

Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857. Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

John Frederick Kensett, Niagara Falls, c. 1852–54. Oil on canvas, White House Collection, Washington, DC.

Shortly after John Frederick Kensett died in 1872, a writer in the Nation recalled that the painter had taken an unusual approach to dramatic subject matter: “Such a subject as Niagara the artist treats without forsaking his calm, like a cultured elocutionist who declaims the most impassioned text, never losing his high-bred balance.”¹ The comment is a useful introduction to this strangely distant view of Niagara Falls. Other painters from the time such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) highlighted the waterfall’s violent force, sometimes adopting a vantage point terrifyingly close to the precipice (see photo). Kensett, by contrast, presented a comparatively tranquil view of the waters from a protected position far downstream. The decision was consistent with Kensett’s reputation for “calm” in both his personal affect and pictorial style.² Today, we might say that “calm” was Kensett’s “brand.” But if calm was a brand, it was a paradoxical marketing technique.

For audiences in the mid-nineteenth century, the quiet repose of Kensett’s work was the opposite of commercial, offering an antidote to the crass sensationalism of popular spectacle. Few subjects at the time were more associated with downmarket entertainment than the rushing waters of Niagara Falls—in 1853, a 1600-foot moving panorama of the Falls went on display in New York City, attracting mass audiences.³ Kensett pointedly resisted such bombast, foregrounding the gentle waves that lap at the rocky shores of the Niagara River while displacing the Falls themselves to the background, their crashing tumult veiled behind a misty haze. At a time when art collectors wished to separate their tastes from the supposedly coarse proclivities of the mass market, such aesthetic understatement became an important sign of cultural and social distinction. The critic who compared Kensett to an elocutionist who never loses “his high-bred balance” makes explicit the association between calm and social class. For Kensett, the approach paid dividends. No less noble a personage than Francis Egerton, first Earl of Ellesmere, purchased a nearly identical version of this painting in 1854 (see image; it is now in the collection of the White House).⁴ Ellesmere paid $500 for the work, the second highest price that any Kensett painting had garnered to that date. Anti-commercialism, it seems, had a commercial appeal.

1. “The Kensett Relics,” Nation, Mar. 20, 1873, 204.

2. Melissa Geisler Trafton, Critics, Collectors, and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of John Frederick Kensett (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 2003), 244–74.

3. Joseph Earl Arrington, “Godfrey N. Frankenstein’s Moving Panorama of Niagara Falls,” New York History 49, no. 2 (1968): 169–99.

4. John Paul Driscoll, “From Burin to Brush: The Development of a Painter,” in John Frederick Kensett: An American Master, ed. Susan E. Strickler (New York: Worcester Art Museum in association with Norton, 1985) 90; William Kloss, Art in the White House: A Nation’s Pride (Washington, DC : White House Historical Association, 1992), 108–9.

Pablo Picasso

William Stanley Haseltine

William Bradford

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent

William Bradford

William Bradford

Albert Bierstadt

John Frederick Kensett

Albert Bierstadt

Francis Augustus Silva

George Inness

James Miller

Winslow Homer

Aaron Shikler

Frederic Edwin Church

William Stanley Haseltine

Mary Stevenson Cassatt

Diego Rivera

James Edward Buttersworth

Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen

Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen

Jasmin Joseph

Samuel Walters

John La Farge

Thomas Cole

John La Farge

John La Farge

John La Farge

John La Farge

John La Farge

John Frederick Kensett

John La Farge

George Bellows

William James Glackens

Charles Webster Hawthorne

Eastman Johnson

William Morris Hunt

Eastman Johnson

Edward Coley Burne-Jones

Fitz Henry Lane

Jack Butler Yeats

Jack Butler Yeats

Jack Butler Yeats

Frederick Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam

Robert Salmon

Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade

Sanford Robinson Gifford

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt

Fitz Henry Lane

Marco Benefial

Gaetano Lapis

Unknown artist (Emilian school)

Giovanni Battista Salvi (Sassoferrato)

Pierre Subleyras

Giambettino or Giuseppe (Fra Felice) Cignaroli

Michele Tosini and assistants

Orazio de Ferrari

William Lamb Picknell

William Merritt Chase

John Joseph Enneking

Elihu Vedder

Harriet Cany Peale

After Annibale Carracci

William Trost Richards

Philip Leslie Hale

John Wollaston

Alessandro Longhi

Anthonij (Anton) Mauve

Jules Dupre

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt

William Bradford

William Bradford

William Buttersworth

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Jules Dupré (1811–89)
Landscape with Woman in Red, c. 1880

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

William Bradford (1823–92)
Coastal Scene with Figures (Grand Manan), 1863

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900)
Coast near Rome, 1886–91

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

James Miller
Peaceable Kingdom, n.d.

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850–1921)
SS “Commonwealth,” 1902

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Jasmin Joseph (1923–2005)
Landscape with Gourds, c. 1965–75

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850–1921)
SS “Glenogle,” 1884

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John Wollaston (1710–75)
Portrait of a Boy, 1750s

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Thomas Cole (1801–48)
The Tempter, 1843

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
Evening Study, Newport, Rhode Island, 1871

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
Windmill (Newport, Windmill, near Easton’s Pond. Early Spring, Southeast Wind), 1864

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, c. 1909

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
Portrait of Margaret Mason Perry La Farge, 1860

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
The Virgin at the Foot of the Cross, 1862–63

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
St. John the Evangelist at the Foot of the Cross, 1862–63

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

John La Farge (1835–1910)
Wood Interior, 1864

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925)
Old Lady with Blue Book, 1919

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98)
The Annunciation, c. 1885

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Eastman Johnson (1824–1906)
Mother and Child: The Reading Lesson, 1870

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Eastman Johnson (1824–1906)
Woman Playing a Harp, c. 1885

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930)
The Oyster Eaters, 1903

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

William Morris Hunt (1824–79)
Woman Knitting and Cow (Fontainebleau), 1860

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)
Autumn Still Life, c. 1906

McMullen Museum
Permanent Collection