Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/08/05/american_art_higlights_from_the_hood.php
Sunday, August 5, 2007
This summer, the Hood Museum of Art will showcase Dartmouth’s collection of American art. This collection is displayed in three of the Hood museum’s galleries and covers the history of American art, 1705-1900. The Hood Museum of Art supports a collection of over sixty-five thousand works, eight thousand of which have American origins. Because gallery space at the Hood is limited, most of these works remain in storage during the year. This exhibition, however, which runs from June 9 through December 9, 2007, gives students and visitors a chance to view Dartmouth’s holdings of American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, some of which have never been displayed in the museum’s galleries.
The exhibition begins in the Dorothy and Churchill Lathrop gallery and continues into the Jaffe-Hall galleries, both found on the second floor of the Hood Museum. These two galleries focus on American art before the turn of the Twentieth Century. “American Art at Dartmouth” continues with art from 1900-1950 in the first floor Israel Sack gallery, which normally houses the Hood’s permanent American art collection. Starting September 22, the Friends-Cheatham galleries will display selections of the Hood’s American watercolors, drawings, prints, and photos.
“American Art at Dartmouth,” is not only a survey of the history of American art, but also shows Dartmouth’s history of collecting art, focusing on how and why these pieces made their way into the Hood’s collection. Dartmouth’s history of collecting can be traced back to a Boston-made silver monteith, or bowl, given to Dartmouth’s founder Eleazar Wheelock in 1773. This gift honored the college’s first commencement and became the foundation for today’s exhibition.
The founding of the Art History department and of Carpenter Hall in 1929 inspired Dartmouth to expand its collection for academic purposes, and led to donations of artwork from generous alumni. The opening of the Hood Museum in 1985 allowed curators to fill gaps in Dartmouth’s collection through the use of acquisition funds. “American Art at Dartmouth” shows the strengths of Dartmouth’s collection in its portraits of Dartmouth luminaries and in its White Mountain landscapes, reflecting the college’s history and geographical location. Later acquisitions support the trend toward looking at American art with a global, multi-ethnic perspective.
The “American Art at Dartmouth” exhibition is loosely chronological. The Dorothy and Churchill Lathrop gallery honors Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth’s founder, and Daniel Webster, known as Dartmouth’s “second founder,” for his triumph in defending Dartmouth’s original charter as a private, not state owned, institution. Portraits of these two men, along with portraits of other figures associated with the founding of the college are displayed in their gold frames, some of which are original to the works, against dark teal walls, interspersed with furniture and silver work contemporary to the college’s founding. This gallery includes a 1769 portrait by Boston painter John Singleton Copley, an Eighteenth Century American master of portraiture, depicting New Hampshire’s last royal governor, John Wentworth, who granted Dartmouth’s original charter.
The Dorothy and Churchill Lathrop gallery, which honors Dartmouth’s founders, shows Dartmouth’s early collecting interests. In the Nineteenth Century, the main interest in the college’s art collection was to seek out portraiture of prestigious faculty and alumni. These portraits were originally housed in Reed Hall, and were later moved to Wilson Hall, Dartmouth’s former library, in 1885.
The first room of the Jaffe-Hall galleries displays examples of several genres of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century high art along with samples of early American material culture. This room includes a small history painting, Hannah Presenting Samuel to Eli, by Benjamin West, famous for his paintings of early American history including The Death of General Wolfe (1770).
This gallery also holds Nineteenth Century works by women artists. Lily Martin Spencer was a painter in the mid-Nineteenth Century known for her genre paintings, or scenes of the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes. The Hood Museum owns Spencer’s The Jolly Washerwoman (1851) which shows a rosy-cheeked workwoman who poses with sleeves rolled up, leaning over her washtub. Another work, Medusa (1854), exemplifies the smooth lines and idealized forms of neoclassical sculpture, in this case by a woman artist, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer. This work presents the viewer with the bust of a beautiful woman, Medusa, at the moment of her transformation into the monstrous gorgon, according to classical mythology. The transformation is symbolized through the presence of snakes which frame her breast and wind through her hair, and through the tiny wings, a less well-known attribute of gorgons, which crown Medusa.
Another interesting example of the talents of American women can be viewed in the two Canterbury, New Hampshire samplers (1833, 1838) by the same woman, Apphia Amanda Young. The 1833 sampler is elementary in its formation of letters and floral patterns, while the 1838 sampler displays intricate embroidery skills achieved through years of practice. These two works, created five years apart, show the progress of needlework training in young women of the Nineteenth Century.
While narrating the development of styles in American high art, the first room of the Jaffe-Hall galleries also displays the accomplishments of Nineteenth Century artisans. Eighteenth Century glass, New England silver works, and antique furniture balance the painting and sculpture found in this gallery.
The second room of the Jaffe-Hall galleries is dominated by landscapes showing the White Mountain region. These landscapes mark both the importance of the White Mountains to the development of wilderness painting while acknowledging Dartmouth’s connection to its environment. The landscapes include views of Mount Washington and other New Hampshire landmarks, embodying the spiritual ideals of Sublime Landscape painting.
Other works in this gallery are linked to important names in American art. Winslow Homer’s pastoral farm scene, Enchanted (1874), and Eastman Johnson’s genre piece, Boy with an Apple (1876) both idealize the simple culture of rural Nineteenth Century America while Thomas Eakins’ The Architect (1896), and James McNeill Whistler’s Dr. Isaac Burnet Davenport (1895-1902/3) portray successful business men who drove America toward becoming an industrialized economic leader.
The second room in the Jaffe-Hall galleries also displays a movement toward mass production, making art available to the American public. After the Civil War, John Rogers popularized sculpture by creating thousands of plaster casts available to the public at low prices. “American Art at Dartmouth” displays his 1866 work Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations, showing a defeated southern woman and her young son taking the oath of loyalty in front of a Union soldier. Standing below the woman is a former slave boy. The presence of the Union soldier, the remains of a southern family, and the former slave presents the viewer with a glimpse into the dynamics of the Reconstruction era south.
The material arts of this gallery include a painted wooden statue of a baseball player, circa 1880, used as a shop-sign for a sporting goods store. Also found in this gallery is a silk embroidered, Mourning Picture for Bezaleel Woodward (1810), Dartmouth’s first librarian. This work shows a woman leaning over a sarcauphagus, and is interesting for its use of the weeping willow and cypress trees, two funerary symbols of the Nineteenth Century.
The Israel Sack gallery, found on the first floor of the Hood museum, contains examples of American art from 1900-1950. This gallery includes representations of Native Americans in art, including Frederick Remington’s Shotgun Hospitality (1908) and Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s bronze, Appeal to the Great Spirit (1912, cast 1922).
Also found in the Israel Sack gallery are works by the artists native to the late Nineteenth Century art colonies of Cornish and Dublin New Hampshire, sanctuaries for artists, writers, designers, and musicians. The Cornish colony was home to the renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose bronze relief, Robert Louis Stevenson (1899) hangs in the Israel Sack gallery. In 1916, Dartmouth College sponsored an exhibition of the works from these two art colonies, which was held in Robinson Hall. The examples in the Israel Sack gallery continue this tradition.
This gallery charts the progress of American art in the Twentieth Century, showing examples of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, with a 1938 work by Jackson Pollock, and other genres which display experimentation through use of bright colors, bold figures, and sharp lines.
“American Art at Dartmouth” charts the progress of both high and material art in America, imparting the viewer with a visual sketch of American history. This exhibit also shows the progress of art at Dartmouth, moving from a visual documentation of well known alumni to a complete collection that can be studied by Dartmouth’s students, accessible to both art history majors and non-art history majors alike. While this exhibit should be a permanent feature in the Hood museum, lack of space makes it imperative for the students of Dartmouth to see this collection before December. Taking advantage of this window into American history connects current students to their predecessors, giving them the opportunity to learn from the accomplishments of our American ancestors. As one alumnus wrote of Dartmouth’s art collection in the 1880 student newspaper,
Perhaps all are not valuable as works, [but they represent] the great and good men who have loved this college… [The works] lead [the student] to contemplate the highest ornaments of life; from these elevated plains he gathers culture and refinement, he adorns his scholarship.