Delaware Art Museum: The Gilded Age in America

The final gallery in this small trio of American Art, is a space filled with works under the title The Gilded Age.  Quick history refresher, the Gilded Age is loosely defined as a period of time after the Civil War starting around 1870 and lasting until 1900.  It's marked by the rapid rise of the industrial economic power-base in the upper mid-west and north east, as well as, a few areas along the west coast.  Titans of industry like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Ford, and a couple of dozen other luminaries of the age built a fore to unimaginable wealth.  An interesting ancillary to this directly impacted the fortunes of artists.  In an attempt to "give back," the noblesse oblige, many built collections of art and patronize artists, turning their collections into landmark art museums, and the artists they patronized into representatives of their vocation and today bell weathers of the quality and completeness of museum collections.

One of the reasons that I love this room is that I find so many of the artists I have come to know and love represented there.

One wall is hung in the salon style with many works of many sizes and various subject matter.  A beautiful sculpture "dances" in the middle of the room.  Of all the works on this wall, most that I've seen so many times before, I found myself zeroing in on one of the least of these by square footage!  It's a sweet little composition by the artist Albert Pinkham Ryder.  His paintings were created in such a way that they appear to be "thick" with pigment and varnish, as well as, filled with little fractures across the surface.  I seem to remember that it was the result of his lack of technique or chosen materials or a confluence of both.  The Phillips Collection in DC (one of those noblesse oblige industrialist who turned his actual home into a museum) has one of his nocturnes on display, and it was my point of entry into the works of this artist.  

"By the Tomb of the Prophet" after 1882

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917)

Another wall features a monumental work on framed wood panels with an illustrators design sense.  I confess, I failed to jot down the credits, but it's just too lovely a piece not to share.

This detail from the right side demonstrates the romantic theme, it could be Shakespeare inspired, or some other writer of note.  I just don't recognize the source of the text.

Opposite is a wall containing a more conservatively hung group of landscape/seascape paintings.  Among them is a George Inness--I love George Inness, but I did not focus on his work this time.  In stead, let's begin with a painting by a regionalist of limited renown.  William Anderson Coffin's depiction of the coming night across the Somerset Valley in west central Pennsylvania.  A personal connection for me is the fact that two to three times a year throughout my youth my family would drive through this valley between our home in Michigan and my paternal grandparent's home in the panhandle of Maryland.  Beyond that, it's just a lovely deceptively simple work of art.

"Evening, Somerset Valley, Pennsylvania" circa 1898

William Anderson Coffin (1855-1925)

The text on the placard reads: "This work--a picture of the landscape near Coffin's farm in Jennerstown, Pennsylvania--won Coffin a silver medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in Saint Louis."  Not much to go on.  Perhaps it was the apex of his artistic career...

Finally, I will highlight a work by my favorite American impressionist, John Henry Twachtman.  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He studied under a couple of the great American artist/teachers Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase.  Soon, he was studying in and painting in various schools and places across Europe from Munich to Venice to Paris, but he left the continent and settle in back in the states in Connecticut where he both painted and mentored younger artists.  He died relatively young, just before his 50th birthday of a stroke.  What I love about his version of impressionism is it's stark, hinting toward a minimalist vision of the subject.  His paintings are pristine.  They seem to hold only the essence of a moment, taut and gentle and zen.

"Sea Scene" 1893

John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902)