A brass Abraham Lincoln presidential campaign medal, 1860, designed by William Leggett Bramhall and produced at Scovill Manufacturing Company. Yale University Numismatic Transfer, 2001, gift of Irving Dillaye Vann.
:Yale University Art Gallery's renowned collection of American fine and decorative arts, one of the finest in the country, is traveling for the first time outside New Haven, Conn. Nearly 200 works from the oldest university art museum in the nation illuminate the nature of the American creative experience from colonial beginnings to its coming of age at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
On view are paintings by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Edward Hicks, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins; silver by Paul Revere and Tiffany; furniture by P.E. Guerin and Alexander Roux; candlesticks by Jeremiah Dummer; and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton E. Watkins, among others. The accompanying catalog is ambitious and excellent.
After opening at the Speed Art Museum, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art 1660–1893 from the Yale University Art Gallery" is now on view at the Seattle Art Museum through May 24. The tour ends at the Birmingham Museum of Art, October 4 to January 10, 2010.
The exhibition and publication were organized by curator of American paintings and sculpture Helen A. Cooper with senior associate curator of American paintings Robin Jaffee Frank; associate curator of prints, drawings and photographs Elisabeth Hodermarsky and curator of American decorative arts Patricia Kane, with the assistance of former graduate curatorial research assistant Amy Kurtz Lansing.
A smaller, superior version of the painting in the rotunda of the US Capitol, John Trumbull's "The Declaration of Independence,” 1786–1820, shows standing, from left, the principal authors: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson (handing the document to the seated John Hancock) and Benjamin Franklin.
To tell the tale of a young nation struggling to forge its own identity culturally, politically and geographically, the exhibition explores three central themes: Expressions of Heritage; Citizenship and Democracy; and Cultural and Material Aspirations.
Starting with the arrival of the first English settlers in Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the British North American colonies experienced a steady tide of European immigration and African slaves. Each group brought diverse heritages, which influenced the objects they created in the New World. As the exhibition section on Expressions of Heritage suggests, a distinctive American artistic language eventually emerged from this mix of national and cultural legacies.
In the early days of the republic, portraiture was the preferred form. The earliest group portrait, "The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage)," was begun by America's first professional portrait painter, John Smibert, in 1728 and completed in 1739. The eight figures were involved in an ill-fated attempt to establish a seminary in Bermuda.
Other memorable faces are those of Cotton Mather, Boston scholar and minister, in a mezzotint, 1728, by engraver Peter Pelham, and the Reverend Ammi Ruhamah Robins, a Connecticut cleric, in an unsparing, 1812 oil painting by self-taught itinerant artist Reuben Moulthrop.
