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The First Harvest in the Wilderness

Karen Sherry on February 3, 2010

Valerie Hegarty's evocation of Asher B. Durand's 1855 painting The First Harvest in the Wilderness in her benefit print for the 1stfans program adds another chapter to the painting's already illustrious history.  Its story begins in 1855, when the Brooklyn Institute—the predecessor to the Brooklyn Museum—commissioned a work from Durand to add to its newly conceived Gallery of Fine Arts.  The money for this painting, as well as the idea for a permanent gallery, came from the late Augustus Graham (1775-1851).  A prominent local businessman and philanthropist, Graham had been actively involved in charitable institutions devoted to the edification of Brooklyn's citizenry, including the Institute (established 1843) and its forerunner, the Apprentices' Library Association (founded 1824).  Upon his death in 1851, he bequeathed a large sum to the Brooklyn Institute with the stipulation that a portion of the money be used for the purchase of art by living American artists for the Institute's picture gallery.  This stipulation was progressive and prescient at a time when few civic institutions had art collections and many patrons viewed American art as inferior to European art.

Asher B. Durand (American, 1796-1886). The First Harvest in the Wilderness, 1855. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 48 1/16 in. (80.3 x 122 cm) Frame: 43 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 4 3/4 in. (110.5 x 151.1 x 12.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Transferred from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences to the Brooklyn Museum, 97.12

For its inaugural purchase with the Graham bequest, the Brooklyn Institute sought out one of the nation's leading artists Asher B. Durand (1796-1886).  At this time, Durand was the dean of American landscape painters known as the Hudson River School and president of the National Academy of Design in New York.  As a sign of support for the Institute, he agreed to accept the Brooklyn commission for $175, a sum far smaller than his usual asking price. 

At first glance, The First Harvest in the Wilderness, which was hanging on the Institute's walls by September of 1856, is an allegory of the nineteenth-century concept of Manifest Destiny.  This belief held that the United States was destined to expand across the entire continent.  (Many Americans viewed westward expansion as the inevitable progress of a divinely favored and culturally superior nation, although it resulted in the exploitation of natural resources and the often violent subjugation of native peoples.)  Durand's picture depicts the softer side of Manifest Destiny in the form of a pioneer family domesticating the frontier through settlement and agriculture.  We see their homestead in the center of the painting in the midst of a rugged landscape of forests and mountains-the bright light that shines upon this clearing not only draws the viewer's attention to the homestead, but also symbolizes divine approbation.  While a man harvests a field of wheat (dotted with the stumps of trees he has felled), his wife stands before their snug log cabin (built from felled trees) and cows and horses graze in their pens.  Durand suggests that the pioneers enjoy the fruits of their labor-an idyllic and bountiful existence on the frontier full of promise of future rewards.

Asher B. Durand (American, 1796-1886). The First Harvest in the Wilderness (detail), 1855. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 48 1/16 in. (80.3 x 122 cm) Frame: 43 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 4 3/4 in. (110.5 x 151.1 x 12.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Transferred from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences to the Brooklyn Museum, 97.12

A closer examination of The First Harvest in the Wilderness reveals that this vision of national progress also had particular, local significance for Brooklyn.  The large rock in the right foreground of the painting is inscribed with the name "GRAHAM," a clear reference to Augustus Graham, the Brooklyn Institute's benefactor whose bequest funded this commission. This rock serves as a rustic gravestone memorializing the man.  In addition, its prominence in the composition symbolizes Graham's important role in advancing civilized pursuits in another kind of wilderness-the American art scene.  One reporter for the art journal The Crayon was quick to pick up on the painting's analogy between progress on the frontier and progress in the arts.  He wrote:

The sentiment of the picture is also in keeping with the circumstances belonging to its production.  The field of Art is, in the country, but just emerging into the reality of a clearing, upon which the sun of encouragement does shine, if it gleams from clouds and is surrounded by shadows.  As an illustration, Mr. Graham may be considered the pioneer in the wilderness, and all honor be to his memory for being the first to make a clearing.[1]

In other words, just as the settler transforms the inhospitable frontier into farmland, so too did Augustus Graham cultivate the arts in the cultural fields of America.  Although Graham's vision for the Brooklyn Institute took decades to accomplish-shifting administrative priorities and declining financial fortunes hampered the plans for a permanent gallery in the nineteenth century-his support helped to make American art one of the finest and foundational collections of the Brooklyn Museum.

Valerie Hegarty. First Harvest in the Wilderness with Pileated Woodpecker, 2010. 10 x 8 in., ed. of 200. © Valerie Hegarty. Image courtesy of the artist and 20×200 | Jen Bekman Projects

Given Graham's commitment to living American artists, it seems only fitting that Valerie Hegarty, an American artist of today, pays tribute to Durand's The First Harvest in the Wilderness—the first painting funded by the Graham bequest.

 

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[1] "Domestic Art Gossip," The Crayon 3, no. 1 (January 1856): 30.

 

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Jonas Platt

Terry Carbone on January 29, 2009

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Jonas Platt, 1828. Oil on canvas, 35 15/16 x 29 7/16 in. (91.3 x 74.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 85.23.

By the mid-1820s, Samuel F. B. Morse finally had achieved in his portraits a more fluid technique and mastery of high color rivaling the accomplishments of the then-elderly Gilbert Stuart. His portrait of Jonas Platt may be counted, along with his Benjamin Silliman, 1825 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), among his most sensitive and finely painted likenesses dating from this brief high point in his artistic career. Particularly in these works, Morse displayed a fluid realism and expressive immediacy that neither Stuart nor Thomas Sully achieved in their own highly fluid but more stylized manners.

Morse received commissions for two portraits of Judge Jonas Platt late in 1827, the year in which the exhibition of his The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York) at the National Academy of Design established him, for a brief time, as New York’s preeminent artist. Platt was by this time a highly successful New York attorney and politician. Son of one of the founders of Plattsburgh, New York, he had studied law and entered the New York offices of Richard Varick by 1790, when he also was admitted to the bar and married Helen Livingston (d. 1859) of Fishkill. Platt left New York City in 1791 to establish a country residence in Whitesboro, near Utica, and open a law office. He represented both Oneida and Onondaga Counties in the state legislature, and was a member of Congress from 1799 to 1800. Platt continued to pursue a political career as a state senator and, in 1810 (the year of his unsuccessful run against the incumbent governor Daniel Tompkins), he joined DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) in promoting the passage of a bill proposing the construction of the Erie Canal. His motives no doubt included enhancing the value of their substantial landholdings and investments in the Oriskany Woolen Mills. He assumed a seat on the State Supreme Court in 1814, the year of a triumphant battle against the British in Plattsburgh. About 1826, Platt reestablished his New York residence and law practice, and remained in the city until 1829, when he retired to a large farm in Valcour, near Plattsburgh, where he died there in 1834.

One of numerous commissions that Morse garnered in the wake of his triumph with the Lafayette portrait, this likeness was commissioned by Moss Kent (1766-1838), a former member of Congress and Platt’s relation by marriage. During Morse’s discouraging 1823 visit to Albany in search of patronage, Moss Kent had been his only sitter; and later that year in New York City, Morse had painted a portrait of Chancellor James Kent (The New-York Historical Society), a powerful conservative in New York State politics, with which he had vainly hoped to establish his reputation in the city. While this prior contact alone made him a likely candidate to execute the Platt portrait, Kent’s choice must have been influenced as well by Morse’s own very active role in conservative New York politics. His ties were manifest not only in several recent commissions, including his 1826 portrait of Governor DeWitt Clinton, Platt’s old ally (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), but in Morse’s own writings. By 1827 he had begun to contribute articles to The New York Observer, a religious newspaper run by his brother Sidney; and that year he founded his own publication, The Journal of Commerce, in which he offered his views on morality and acceptable entertainments. Morse’s receipt of the Platt commission may also have been a legacy of his recently deceased father’s rigid Federalism, which earlier had won him the good graces of John Adams.

Platt, whose stature had risen with the lavishly celebrated opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, was another artistic and political feather in the artist’s cap. Morse depicted Platt as a decorous, calm, and cerebral man with attributes signifying his reliance on the written word. He finished the portrait by February 4, 1828, and exhibited it at the National Academy of Design annual that spring, when the heated controversy with the National Academy’s rival institution, the American Academy of Fine Arts, was at its height. It apparently was well received, judging from another letter from Morse to his mother in which he wrote, “[M]y portrait has obtained me, by exhibiting it, six portraits at least.”

The portrait of Jonas Platt is currently on view in the American Identities Galleries on the 5th floor. It can be found in the section entitled 'From Colony to Nation.' The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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John Adams

Terry Carbone on January 21, 2009

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Portrait of John Adams, 1816. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 24 15/16 in. (75.5 x 63.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 32.144.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s unrelentingly factual portrait of the former president John Adams was both the result of an important commission from the leading Philadelphia publisher Joseph Delaplaine (1777-1824) and the cause of one of the artist’s earliest professional disappointments. When Morse returned to Boston from London in the fall of 1815, he was hopeful that his student success at the Royal Academy predicted his future success in America. In advance of his arrival, he had explained in a letter to his parents that he planned to begin painting portraits immediately, at a charge forty dollars below Stuart’s, earning enough within a year to return to England with more important commissions in hand. Circumstances were to prove harder than expected, however, and by the time the young artist received the offer of several commissions from Delaplaine, his well-connected father had already communicated with one of the prospective sitters, John Adams, on his son’s behalf.

As early as the summer of 1814, Joseph Delaplaine had begun to circulate an extravagant prospectus advertising a series of illustrated volumes entitled Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished American Characters. He had initiated the project with a substantial profit in mind, and therefore intended to pay very little for the original portraits on which his engraving illustrations would be based. Morse must have relished the opportunity to contribute to Delaplaine’s grandly conceived effort despite the offer of a mere twenty-five dollars per portrait (Morse was probably aware that Gilbert Stuart had received $100 for a portrait of the aging ex-president earlier that year). In part as a favor to the elder Morse, John Adams grudgingly obliged to sit for the portrait, commenting, “It seems not worth while to take a bald head, on which fourscore Winters have snowed.” He delayed their encounter, however, continuing, “[I]t would be too much to ask [Morse] to come to me and it would be disturbing for me, in the dead of winter, to go to Boston. . . .. But who knows what may happen before spring.”

Morse apparently completed the portrait in relative haste while staying at the Adams home, for by February 10, 1816, Abigail Adams had declared it “a stern unpleasing likeness.” Admittedly shocking in its directness and honesty, it was nevertheless an improvement over other of Morse’s early portraits, which conveyed neither the physical substance nor vitality of his sitters. The determination with which Morse documented the deep creases and sagging flesh, the graceless stare, and pinched, involuntary grimace of the elderly Adams was surely unexpected. Adams’s own reaction to Morse’s portrait is more difficult to gauge. Delaplaine’s was quick and negative; he immediately sought to convince Adams of its shortcomings, and unsuccessfully requested access to the portrait of Adams that had been executed by Gilbert Stuart.In his rejection of the portrait, Delaplaine quoted to Morse the harsh critiques of the artist’s peers and stated his intention to withhold payment. Humiliated by the rebuff and frustrated by Stuart’s confirmed hold on the portrait market, Morse abandoned his artistic practice temporarily that summer.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Update 1/28/09: The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

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