The New-York Historical Society Celebrates 200 Years

The New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) is itself a gem. It was the premier art museum in New York until the establishment of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, and today it remains an important force. The collections are as stunningly wide-ranging and multifaceted as New York City itself, and virtually every object has a New York connection.

The holdings run to more than 4.5 million documents and countless newspapers, paintings and portraits, New York furniture (including first-rate Duncan Phyfe pieces and his tool box) and decorative objects, maps, prints, architectural drawings and photographs. It even includes a collection of more than 10,000 menus, a collection of Gold Rush material and extensive holdings of sheet music and broadsides. Among its earliest holdings is a print from the 1626 engraving, "Fort nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans."

It also houses an exceptional range of materials relating to slavery and reconstruction, including documents of the identities of the first Africans to arrive in New York, who were brought by the Dutch in 1627. This collection will be the subject of an exhibition, "Slavery and the Making of New York," that will open at the society in the fall.

Other rich collecting areas include the history of the circus, Revolutionary and Civil War material, material on New York architecture and real estate, Tiffany glass and a collection pertaining to New York hotels.

There is also the spectacular collection of 433 of the 435 original watercolors that John J. Audubon made for Birds of America. The society purchased the entire group from the artist's widow in 1863. Audubon was an obsessive observer and note-taker; the pages and pages of notes he made about the birds he observed and then painted are part of the holdings. Because of their fragility, a limited number of Audubon's original watercolors are placed on view each year on rotating basis.

The collections also include a vast range of American portraits, among them paintings by Rembrandt Peale and Gilbert Stuart; a broad compilation of American sculptural pieces from the colonial era to today. A group of drawings by John Singer Sargent was recently discovered among the society's holdings.

The society's collections have enabled it to mount some show-stopping exhibits over its history. They range from the 1999 "Building History: History Building," a view of the society's own history and expansion; to the compelling "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America;" last winter's blockbuster "Alexander Hamilton: The Man who Made America" and the annual exhibit of a limited number of Audubon's original watercolors.

The exhibit "Seat of Empire: Napoleon's Armchair from Malmaison to Manhattan" was a review of the fauteuil and its odyssey that brought it to New York. As a result of that show, two more of Napoleon's chairs surfaced; one has returned to Malmaison and the other is newly identified in a private collection. Objects from the society also formed the central exhibit at the Winter Antiques Show where Audubon's favorite bird, the colorful Carolina parakeet, held pride of place.

'Nature And The American Vision'

The N-YHS collection of Hudson River paintings is perhaps its most formidable. In celebration of its bicentennial, the society recently opened "The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society: Nature and the American Vision," a showcase exhibit of more than 100 paintings drawn from the collections. The show, like the Hudson itself, is sweeping and profound, and its themes are at once divergent and tangential. The river is the subject; so too are the artists who painted it.

The river, as depicted, reflects the course of American history with respect to geography, art, philosophy, technology and economy, and social progress. The exhibit reflects the same and is itself both a testament and a celebration of the depth and breadth of the society's collections.

The paintings and related material on view in exhibition only hint at the amazing range and depth of the society's collection of landscape paintings by artists of the Hudson River school. The art is organized into ten different subject areas beginning with a look at New York as an early port city and moving onward to the national "Grand Tour," which describes Nineteenth Century travel up and down the Hudson, first by steamboat and later by train.

Another selection of 20 paintings document particularly impressive natural sites along the river; yet another looks at the splendid estates and rural retreats that prosperous Nineteenth Century New Yorkers built for themselves. Space is also given to scenes of Italy by such Hudson River luminaries as Thomas Cole, Jasper F. Cropsey and Sanford R. Gifford.

Dominating a section on great landscape narratives is Thomas C. Cole's five-part painting cycle "The Course of Empire," a spectacular icon of the Hudson River School. The work illustrates the Nineteenth Century view of the glory of the natural world and man's place in it with respect to God and nature. It offers a commentary on the rise and fall of a classical city, or state or empire, depending on the viewer's perspective.

Louise Mirrer, the society's president and chief executive officer, describes the Hudson River show as "an exhibition only we can do." She refers to the range of paintings, the portraits of the patrons who commissioned the pictures and the amazing plethora of related materials.

The Luman Reed gallery exemplifies art collecting in Nineteenth Century New York. Reed was a successful merchant who over a six-year span gathered one of the most important collections of European and American art in the country. He displayed his collection in a two-room gallery in his house in lower Manhattan, which also served as a salon for artists, writers and patrons of the arts of the day. Reed had befriended Thomas Cole and ultimately commissioned "The Course of Empire," which was completed in 1836 and installed in Reed's home. He commissioned several other works by Cole. Reed, a patron of contemporary art of the day, was a firm believer in the aesthetic of an American art.

He also fostered the careers of Asher Brown Durand and William Sidney Mount and was their generous supporter. After Reed's death, his work was gathered into the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, which was acquired by the society in 1858.

The Luman Reed gallery is also the usual location of William Guy Wall's "Hudson River Portfolio" and related material, which is on view in the special exhibit, along with watercolors never before exhibited. Wall's "Hudson River Portfolio" earned him the sobriquet "father of the Hudson River School." The portfolio comprises 20 exquisitely detailed views of New York City and river sites.

Wall, an Irish artist visiting New York, began sketching the river and its surrounds on an 1820 sketching tour of the Hudson River Valley. The results are some of the earliest known images of the area. Eight of Wall's original preparatory watercolors for the portfolio are on view along with five other watercolors of merit that the artist chose not to include in the final portfolio. Several images after Wall were used as transfer decorations of a set of Staffordshire, some of which are also on view.

Wall's portfolio drew wide attention to American landscape and natural beauty, resulting in expanded tourism as Americans at home embarked on their own "Grand Tours," particularly along the Hudson. Two panoramic maps of the Hudson River made in 1847 have been enlarged and are on view to enable viewers to locate historic sites and landmarks, many of which still exist today. Roberta J.M. Olson, associate curator of drawings, says the Wall images provide "an amazing window on the culture that we all share." She views the exhibition as a celebration of the holdings of the society, pure and simple.

Space in the exhibition is also reserved for paintings of seasonal and diurnal cycles, dramatic landscapes and genre paintings, all of which fall under the umbrella of the Hudson River School, which has traditionally extended to include romantic paintings of the Hudson, the Catskills, New England and westward expansion. Hudson River School artists concentrated on themes of harmony between man and nature.

The exhibition concludes with a look at the relationships between New York artists and their patrons. Special attention is given Luman Reed and Thomas Jefferson Bryan, who were among the first to recognize the value of collecting American art. Their collections of Hudson River paintings, which were donated in the mid-Nineteenth Century, formed the backbone of the society's holdings. Another important patron was Robert Leighton Stuart, whose collection of genre paintings formed another essential element of the institutional holdings.

Luce Center

Some 40,000 artifacts and art objects from four centuries are on view on a rotating basis in the innovative display space afforded by the 21,000-square-foot Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. The center was opened in 2000 and allows wide access to the objects and a behind-the-scenes peek at the workings of a museum. Visitors can take in the society's 132 Tiffany lamps and four Tiffany windows in the Luce Center, which also houses the Schuyler teapot, the earliest known piece of New York silver, and objects as disparate as Gouverneur Morris's turned and carved oak prosthetic leg and sections of the wooden aqueduct system of Nineteenth Century New York.

The Luce Center houses much of the vast and extraordinary American folk art collection of sculptor Elie Nadelman that it purchased from the artist in 1937 for $50,000. The Nadelman collection, which once included some 70,000 pieces, formed the basis of the society's folk art holdings. Nadelman began collecting in 1919 and his gleanings spanned the mid-Thirteenth Century through the Nineteenth Century. The majority of the pieces of view from the Nadelman collection represent the core of N-YHS's superb Americana collection and include furniture, metalwork, a spectacular selection of stoneware, sgraffito and other ceramics, glass, textiles, paintings, sculpture and weathervanes, along with frakturs and other works on paper.

The historical society is also a research library, among the oldest and best in the country. It holds collections of photographs from as early as 1839, documents relating to military and naval history back to the Revolutionary War, architectural documents and drawings and the 850,000-piece Bella C. Landauer collection of business and advertising art.

Mirrer points out that the extraordinary variety of its collections places the organization in the unique position of having chronicled the responses to every event in the history of the nation. The society's collections tell the story of American history through the prism of New York. As extensive as they are, they continue to grow.

Mirrer, who became president of the society in June 2004, arrived at the society in the wake of a $40 million capital improvement project that saw the opening of the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, additional new galleries, a new museum store and state-of-the-art curatorial space and library reading room, and museum and library cataloging projects funded by the Luce and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations.

One of her stated goals was to bring Linda S. Ferber to the institution as director of museums. Ferber, who is guest curator of the Hudson River show, is chair of the department of American art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She assumes her new position in September. Ferber describes the society as "a great institution with great collections." Her goals include wider access to the collections.

Reflecting on the position of the society at 200 years, Mirrer observed, "History is not static; neither is the society." In keeping with its mission of gathering, preserving and interpreting materials related to New York, the city and the nation, the society has embarked on "History Responds," a massive compilation, cataloging and exhibit of historical evidence and ramifications of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The collection is drawn from sources as varied as the Fresh Kills landfill, the police and fire departments, the 24-hour relief centers, the hospitals and the neighborhoods. Contributions have come from photographers, firefighters, EMS technicians, clergymen and construction workers. The archive of eyewitness materials continues to expand. Since September 11, 2001, the society has mounted some 15 special exhibits about the event.

Ever evolving, in regard to the collections both past and present, the troves have yet to be fully mined, states Mirrer. That continuing process can be expected to reveal even more about the early days of New York and the young republic and will surely result in continued landmark exhibitions.

"The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society: Nature and the American Vision" remains on view through February 6. N-YHS is at 170 Central Park West. For information, 212-873-3400 or www.nyhistory.org.