Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century edited by Linda S. Ferber and Margaret R. Laster

Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons is the sixth and final book published in the series, Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America, conceived by the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection. The first volume in the series was published in 2014, but this is the only volume to focus on US art, albeit still referred to in the text as “American” art. Although the Frick’s series has ended, there are two other such series by different publishers: Brill’s Studies in the History of Collecting and Art Markets (since 2016) and Bloomsbury’s Contextualizing Art Markets (since 2019). The editors of Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons are Linda Ferber, Senior Art Historian and Museum Director Emerita at the New-York Historical Society, and Margaret Laster, an independent scholar of US art and consultant to the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting. Samantha Deutch, the series editor, is the Digital Art History Lead and Assistant Director of the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library. The book’s eleven essays, written by prominent scholars and curators, provide an overview of the evolution of the market for and promotion of US art during the long nineteenth century. The book stems from the 2017 symposium, “Made in the USA: Collecting American Art During the Long Nineteenth Century,” held at the Frick Collection.

Beautifully illustrated, Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons is an excellent addition to scholarship, enriching the history of US art collecting from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, when the art market in the US developed. Various themes are threaded throughout the book, including the fostering of an “American” art distinct from its European roots; the role of early collectors, patrons, museum founders, and institutions in advancing US tastes for US-made art; and the difficulties in creating public galleries and art museums. Lesser-known artists and collectors are discussed alongside those better known. Essays also consider the challenges posed by the centrality of New York City as an art center as well as outside factors such as the Civil War, the stock market crash of 1929, and the two world wars. Each of the three parts highlights a different concern in forming collections and advancing taste for US art, exposing the complex cultural, political, and ideological environments that affected collecting. Most essays, by necessity, discuss the New York City art market and artists, although other cities, such as Atlanta, GA; Aurora, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Hartford, CT; Houston, TX; and Los Angeles, CA, are included in some essays.

Although most essays focus on male patrons, for which documentation is nearly always more readily available, women collectors are sometimes mentioned. Elizabeth Colt, one of the subjects of Elizabeth Kornhauser’s essay, receives the most attention. Helen Clay Frick, Mary Barker Reed, and Minnie Carl Untermeyer are discussed in other essays. Tantalizing mentions of more women, such as the dealer and forger Rose de Forest, artist Lillian Genth, Chicago collector Mary Otis Jenkins, and researcher Anna Wells Rutledge, who worked during the 1950s at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, were unknown to this reviewer at least. These mentions pique one’s curiosity and make plain that much more research on this topic remains to be done.

Linda Ferber’s excellent introduction provides an overview of “Collecting American Art During the Long Nineteenth Century.” She briefly describes various aspects in the trajectory of collecting, from artists’ organizations to collectors’ legacies, landmark exhibitions, collecting during and after the Civil War, US art at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition and 1876 Centennial Exhibition, the postwar decline of interest in US art, and the continued interest in realism in the early twentieth century.

The book is divided into three chronological parts with three or four essays in each. Part 1 is “Crafting a Cultural Identity: Early Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons” (four essays), followed by part 2, “Turbulence of Taste in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America” (three essays), and, finally, part 3, “Promoting, Advancing, and Collecting American Art at the Turn of the Century and Beyond” (four essays).

The four essays in part 1 present case studies of pioneering individual collectors in New York, NY, and Hartford, CT. Lance Humphries discusses the key role of Robert Gilmor Jr. in defining an “American” school. Humphries counters the narrative of Gilmor as a bossy US patron by showing that Gilmor, although demanding, left artists to their best judgment. Gilmor was a patron of Thomas Cole, despite believing in the importance of Old Master European art as a foundation for US art. He thus invested more in European art; he hoped that US art would assimilate and evolve by embracing its European roots. Ultimately, Gilmor’s collection was dispersed, but Humphries demonstrates how Gilmor was a key early patron of US art.

In her essay, Margaret Laster examines the trajectory of the Luman Reed Collection from its formation around 1830 to its public manifestation in the 1840s and 1850s. Laster emphasizes that Reed’s wife, Mary Barker Reed, along with Reed’s son-in-law and business partner, played a key role in maintaining the collection despite Reed’s lack of a will. Mary Reed helped set the stage for the opening of the short-lived New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts in 1844. Fortunately, that endeavor kept the collection together until it was deposited at the New-York Historical Society in 1858.

Kimberly Orcutt analyzes the influence but ultimate failure of the American Art-Union (1838–52), a collective group that caused people in the United States to ask questions about aesthetics, authority, and expertise. The Art-Union aimed to encourage the middle class across the US to become art patrons, giving out prints, paintings, and sculptures via lotteries. Although the Art-Union ultimately failed, it was a significant steppingstone in US art patronage.

Elizabeth Kornhauser focuses on the collecting practices of the two leading art patrons in Connecticut: Daniel Wadsworth and Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, both of whom commissioned and supported landscape painting. Wadsworth relied on Thomas Cole for advice. (Coincidentally, Wadsworth, Cole, and Gilmor all died in 1848.) He purchased his first Cole painting in 1826 for twenty-five dollars, roughly $795 today (sigh!).‍[1] The lifetimes of Wadsworth and Colt overlapped. Elizabeth Jarvis was eighteen years old when the Wadsworth Atheneum opened in 1844, and she relied on Frederic Church, Cole’s student, for advice. The combination of the Wadsworth and Colt collections under one roof provide a summary of mid- to late-nineteenth-century US patronage.

The three essays in part 2 examine the era around the Civil War. Lynne Ambrosini takes the reader to the Midwest in her case study of Nicholas Longworth, the wealthiest man in Cincinnati, then considered part of “the West.” She relies on newly digitized archives of newspapers and letters at the Cincinnati Historical Society. Her point of departure is an anti-abolitionist letter signed “You Know Who,” which Longworth penned. Although Longworth is known for his patronage of Hiram Powers and Robert S. Duncanson, this letter complicates his motives, particularly for supporting Duncanson, an African American artist. Longworth paid for Duncanson’s nine-month European trip and commissioned eight landscape murals from him. In considering Longworth’s legacy as an art patron, Ambrosini writes, “Longworth took ‘fostering western genius’ as his personal project” (92). Longworth advised artists on marketing and pricing and ultimately aided about fourteen artists; his house is now the Taft Museum of Art.

Sophie Lynford’s essay argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites were promoted by future Harvard art historian and friend of John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, and Yale professor of physical and political geography, Daniel Coit Gilman. Their brief, interdisciplinary collaboration began when the American Pre-Raphaelites debuted in New York in 1863, the year they founded the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. Comprised of thirty members, at its core were two architects (Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis Jr.), six painters (Thomas Charles Farrer, John William Hill, John Henry Hill, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, and William Trost Richards), two scientists (James Gardiner and Clarence King), and a critic (Clarence Cook). Unlike their British counterparts, they eschewed Shakespearean and medieval themes in favor of nature. These artists were frustrated reformers who believed in John Ruskin and whose central goal was, unlike Longworth, abolition. They pictured America as a new Eden that hid corruption and provided visual support for Norton’s and Gilman’s progressive agenda. Their collaboration culminated in an 1867 exhibition at Street Hall, a Gothic Revival building that today comprises part of the Yale University Art Gallery. One of the artists, Charles Herbert Moore, became an art instructor at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and taught prerequisites to Norton’s art history courses.

Sarah Cash traces the history of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the nation’s first art museum, from its beginning as William Wilson Corcoran’s growing private collection from the 1840s, when he became a widower, to the museum James Renwick built kitty corner to the White House in 1859, to its opening in 1874, and finally to its demise in 2014 and redistribution in 2018. Corcoran began purchasing US art in 1850, and his support of the Washington Art Association (1856–60) helped further his involvement in collecting in the nation’s capital. Corcoran’s story intersects with some of the others in the volume, including those of Robert Gilmor Jr., Luman Reed, and Daniel Wadsworth, as well as the American Art-Union. One of Corcoran’s most important purchases was Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (model 1841–1843, carved 1846; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), which links him to Nicholas Longworth, who was also one of Powers’s patrons. Additionally, as a Southern sympathizer and slaveholder, Corcoran spent the Civil War period in Paris, where he met fellow Southern sympathizer William T. Walters, the Baltimore collector who later chaired Corcoran’s Trustee Committee on American Art and may have connected Corcoran to dealers George A. Lucas and Samuel P. Avery. These networks were crucial in developing the US art market.

Part 3 brings the reader into the twentieth century and modernism in four essays. Barbara Gallati unearths the patronage of Samuel Untermyer, who purchased Whistler’s iconic Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit) in 1892. Untermyer has since disappeared into scholarly oblivion due in part to the lack of archival sources; Samuel and Minnie Untermyer’s auction catalogues are the only surviving documentation of their collection. Although little extant documentation records their patronage, Untermyer is known to have purchased at least nine paintings, both US and European, from the 1891 George I. Seney sale. Untermyer bought from these already-vetted collections at auction. He also relied on artist Sydney Starr, a British expatriate, for his purchase of the Whistler painting. He continued purchasing, but when five works were loaned to the 1904 Comparative Exhibition of Native and Foreign Art in New York, his wife Minnie Untermyer was listed as the lender. Her role in purchasing paintings cannot be determined, although she is documented as having purchased many decorative works at various auctions. Unlike other collectors in this volume, neither Untermyer seems to have been interested in forming a collection for philanthropic aims.

Richard Saunders then examines the collecting of American Colonial portraits during the early twentieth century. His essay details the rising interest in such portraits after the Civil War and the subsequent flood of fakes on the market. Dealer Thomas B. Clarke and his son, Thomas B. Clarke Jr. were also eventually involved in the art trade through Clarke’s Art House gallery. Frank W. Bayley, owner of Copley Galleries in Boston, also took advantage of trusting collectors. An unsavory network, including forgers Augustus and Rose de Forest, quickly formed. However, the stock market crash of 1929 ended the colonial portrait boom, and Bayley, increasingly under suspicion, died by suicide in 1932; Clarke Sr. had died the previous year. Clarke’s collection, fakes and all, was sold to the Andrew W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust and ultimately deposited in the National Gallery of Art.

Next, Ilene Fort charts the career of Chicago-born William Preston Harrison and his efforts to cultivate taste for US art at what is now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. Serious collectors of US art in Los Angeles did not appear until after World War I. Harrison relocated to Los Angeles and became a pioneering donor to the museum, which formed in 1910 without a permanent collection. He began purchasing paintings in 1913 and exhibited his collection at the Los Angeles Museum in 1917. Rather than purchase through dealers, Harrison sought relationships with the artists themselves, befriending Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Robert Henri, and John Sloan. Hassam became his most trusted art advisor, and Fort notes that this relationship has not yet been explored. In 1928, Hassam, not a fan of abstraction, was asked to write a survey of painting in the United States. In it, he praised Harrison as a model benefactor of US art.

Finally, Julie Flanagan brings the reader back to New York in her essay on the Grand Central Art Galleries in the 1920s and 1930s. John Singer Sargent was one of the founders of this not-for-profit artists’ collective intended to advance US art. Artist members included Cecilia Beaux, Daniel Chester French, Harriet Frishmuth, Malvina Hoffman, Violet Oakley, Isamu Noguchi, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Like the American-Art Union that Orcutt discusses, the Grand Central Art Galleries did advance interest in US art, and, by lottery, lucky lay members (such as Helen Clay Frick) could win a painting by one of the members. The fourteen-thousand-square-foot gallery opened on the sixth floor of Grand Central Terminal in 1923. Its convenient location allowed for traveling exhibitions; venues in Atlanta, GA, Aurora, IL, and Houston, TX, were especially significant case studies in Flanagan’s essay. Two fires severely damaged the exhibition space just weeks before the stock market crash of 1929, and traveling exhibitions shifted from national to international locations. This essay leaves one wishing there still was an art gallery in Grand Central.

All together, these essays underscore the difficulties of acquiring and appreciating US art during the early period of the market’s development. This task was accomplished in fits and starts with enthusiastic, idealistic, and persistent collectors and patrons who focused largely on landscape and figural work. This volume invites further study on the history of US art collecting. Dense footnotes provide rich archival source material that lends itself to additional research. Aside from being just fascinating, many of these essays are likely to enhance US art courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Anyone interested in US art and in the founding of US art institutions will want to read this book.