LANDMARK EXHIBITION ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY:

NEW YORK, 1825-1861
OPENS AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM ON SEPTEMBER 19
September 19, 2000-January 7, 2001
The Tisch Galleries

By the second quarter of the 19th century, New York City - already the nation's financial center - was poised to become a "world city" on a par with London and Paris. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which linked the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River, the great port of New York became the gateway to the West, assuring the city's commercial preeminence. Over the next 35 years, until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, New York grew rapidly, becoming the "Empire City" - the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and the nation's center of domestic and foreign trade, culture, and the arts.

Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 19, 2000, the landmark exhibition Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 will explore the visual arts in America during this time, chronicling New York's ascendancy to the position of the nation's primary art center and capital of culture, a role it has claimed ever since. The presentation will feature some 310 works from 84 lenders in the United States and Europe.

The exhibition is made possible by Fleet.

"Through the hundreds of works that will be brought together for this unprecedented exhibition, New Yorkers - as well as our visitors from around the world - will experience the moment when New York City began to perceive itself as the center of culture in America. Indeed, the city we know today - the vibrant capital of art, architecture, design, and fashion - finds its roots in this period," commented Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum.

Terrence Murray, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fleet, noted: "Fleet is proud to sponsor this exhibition, our first at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This promises to be a beautiful exhibition, and one that pays homage to the wonderful City of New York in a very special way. We know that our customers depend on us for innovative financial services, and that our communities depend on us for creative investment. With this exhibition and the student pass program we are supporting to encourage visits by students and their families, we hope to convey our commitment to the New York communities where Fleet plays a vital economic and philanthropic role."

The presentation of Art and the Empire City will be thematic within a chronological framework, beginning with works that characterize New York's status in 1825 as a relatively small city, on the verge of great prominence. Moving through the galleries, visitors will learn how economic, historical, technological, demographic, and cultural forces coalesced, transforming New York into a major metropolis. The 12 galleries of the exhibition will be organized as follows:

The Rise of a Great City
The exhibition will open with works representing the year 1825, when New York City celebrated the completion of the Erie Canal and its artists conceived of the National Academy of Design, one of the nation's first fine arts institutions. Immediately, visitors will encounter the imposing, 1825-26 full-length portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette by Samuel F. B. Morse, on loan from New York's City Hall. Lafayette was much loved in America for his role in the Revolutionary War and returned to the United States in 1824 for a grand, national tour. In New York, he witnessed the opening of the Erie Canal, and City officials were inspired to commission his portrait. All of the major artists in New York vied for the opportunity to paint Lafayette. The commission - the most important of the decade - guaranteed Morse's position as a leader among artists, initiating the brilliant career of the man who would become master of photography, inventor of the telegraph, a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design, and a champion of the movement to foster the arts in America.

Flanking Lafayette's portrait will be a pair of monumental silver presentation vases from the Metropolitan's own collection, crafted in 1824-25 by Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner. A gift of thanks to Governor De Witt Clinton from the merchants of Pearl Street for his role in envisioning and overseeing the building of the Erie Canal, these elaborate covered vases are embellished with scenes of the canal's construction. In 1825, New York was still dependent on Philadelphia for silversmiths capable of such a high level of craftsmanship, but that would soon change, as a presentation coffee urn (The Detroit Institute of Arts) in the same gallery, made by Gale and Moseley of New York in 1829, makes evident.

The nascent American school of landscape painting will be represented by View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains, a breathtaking vista over the Hudson River painted by Thomas Cole around 1827, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cole captivated New York artists and art patrons with his depictions of the American wilderness, elevating landscape to the status of serious subject matter in painting. His followers - Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, and other New York City artists - came to be known as the Hudson River School.

Hand-colored engravings, aquatints, and lithographs depict New York as it was then - concentrated in lower Manhattan below 14th Street. The gallery will feature works from the Metropolitan's collection, such as William J. Bennett's engraving South Street from Maiden Lane (ca. 1828), a streetscape still recognizable today, and the large-scale New York Harbor from the Battery (1829) by Thomas Thompson, a landmark in the history of American lithography. Thomas Hornor's early depiction of Broadway at Canal Street (1836), an aquatint and etching with hand-coloring, shows the city's main street bustling with merchants, carriages, carts, and shoppers.

Portraiture in Antebellum New York
During the 1820s and 1830s, before the influence of Cole's interpretations of the American landscape was felt, portraiture dominated American painting and sculpture. The exhibition's second gallery will recreate an early-19th-century portrait gallery, recalling the famous Governor's Room (then the actual New York City office of the state's governor) in City Hall. The gallery will present painted portraits and marble busts of some of New York's most distinguished artists, writers, and cultural leaders by the nation's most accomplished artists. The Yale University Art Gallery will lend a commanding marble bust of the painter John Trumbull by Robert Ball Hughes (modeled 1833; carved 1834-after 1840), while Trumbull's own work will be represented in the gallery by his 1792 full-length portrait of Alexander Hamilton (Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Collection of Americana), a statesman revered by New Yorkers. Other prominent figures, such as De Witt Clinton, Andrew Jackson, who was president of the United States from 1829 to 1837, the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, the painters Cole and Asher B. Durand, and the author Washington Irving are among the New York luminaries rendered by painters such as Durand and Morse and sculptors such as Hiram Powers and John Frazee.

Architecture, 1825-1840
Many of New York's great public buildings of the era (most no longer extant), as well as both typical and visionary housing projects, were executed in the Grecian style. Architectural drawings of compelling clarity and beauty illustrate the style that dominated the period between 1825 and about 1840, on view in the third gallery. In addition to original presentation drawings, the gallery will include selections from a masterpiece of early New York lithography, Alexander Jackson Davis's Views of the Public Buildings in the City of New York Correctly Drawn on Stone (1827), printed by Anthony Imbert. Two of the works from the series, the Rotunda - a building in City Hall Park constructed in 1818-20 to house John Vanderlyn's grand panorama of the gardens and the palace at Versailles - and the façade of the Branch Bank of the United States, are of particular interest because both the panorama and the façade can be seen on permanent display in the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing.

Decorative Arts, 1830-1845
The fourth gallery will feature interior furnishings that would have been found in Grecian-style houses and decorative arts in various media dating from around 1830 to around 1845. The Brooklyn Museum of Art will lend a pair of pilasters and a mahogany door with a pedimented frame from Clarkson Lawn, a grand Greek Revival house built in Brooklyn in the mid-1830s. Joseph Meeks and Sons, one of the most prolific New York cabinetmaking firms of the period, will be represented by a bold mahogany-veneered pier table (ca. 1835; private collection) with curvilinear supports, and also by a hand-colored broadside, a rare lithograph of enormous importance to the history of American furniture, which shows the firm's product line in 1833. A rosewood armchair, couch, and six nested tables (all from private collections) were part of a large order of furniture supplied by Duncan Phyfe and Son in 1840-41 for use at Millford plantation in South Carolina. Such works exemplify the appreciation in other parts of the country for New York style and allude to New York's ability to supply fine goods to broader domestic markets, especially in the South.

Among the objects in silver, Baldwin Gardiner's covered tureen on a stand (ca. 1830; private collection) and a delicate basket by Marquand and Company (1833-38; The Baltimore Museum of Art) bear eloquent testimony to the high level of craftsmanship and design by then available in New York. An exquisite pair of argand lamps (ca. 1835; Dallas Museum of Art), probably manufactured in England, bear the mark of the New York retailer J. and I. Cox, an important purveyor of lighting fixtures and other domestic and imported goods.

The period from the 1820s through the 1840s saw a vogue for richly cut glass - such as the examples made by the Bloomingdale Flint Glass Works and the Jersey Glass Company, shown in this gallery - that provided glittering ornament for dining tables and sideboards. In ceramics, refined earthenwares - such as a large pitcher embellished with thistles (ca. 1835-50; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) that was produced in nearby Jersey City by the American Pottery Manufacturing Company - although thought of as utilitarian wares, are remarkable for their crisply molded surface decorations.

Knickerbocker Writers and Artists
The interrelationship between the visual arts and literature will be explored in the fifth gallery, which includes such masterworks as Thomas Cole's 1827 oil painting Last of the Mohicans (Wadsworth Atheneum), inspired by the eponymous James Fenimore Cooper novel, and Asher B. Durand's 1849 iconic painting Kindred Spirits (The New York Public Library), a tribute to both Cole (who had died in 1848) and poet William Cullen Bryant. Marble busts of Cole and Bryant by Henry Kirke Brown will flank the painting. Robert Weir's depiction of St. Nicholas (ca. 1837; The New-York Historical Society) gives an elfish face to the character developed by Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 in his classic New York City poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (popularly known as "The Night Before Christmas").

Connoisseurship and Collecting in New York
A measure of New York's increasing cultural sophistication was reflected in the number and quality of foreign works of art on view in public exhibitions or acquired by New Yorkers for their personal collections. The sixth gallery will present unprecedented documentation of the opening of the American market to foreign works of art, with such Old Master paintings as A Grand Landscape (An Extensive Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Village Church) by Jacob van Ruisdael (1665-70; The National Gallery, London) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's painting Four Figures on a Step (ca. 1655; The Kimbell Art Museum), which were first displayed in New York in 1830. Over time, New Yorkers developed an appreciation for works by contemporary European artists, including Rosa Bonheur, whose 1851-53 The Horse Fair was shown to great fanfare in 1857 and eventually entered the Metropolitan's permanent collection. Works ranging from Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen's Ganymede and the Eagle (1817-29; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts) to J. M. W. Turner's renowned Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1832; Yale Center for British Art) will illustrate the quality and diversity of art works seen in New York before the Civil War. Works owned by private collectors of the time - such as the 1449 Triumph of Fame (birth tray of Lorenzo de' Medici) by Giovanni di Ser Giovanni di Simone, called Scheggia (originally in the renowned collection of Thomas J. Bryan, and now in the Metropolitan), as well as engravings after Old Masters (Rembrandt and Titian) and 19th-century works (after Paul Delaroche and David Wilkie) - are among the other works on display in this gallery.

The New York Crystal Palace, 1853
New York's presence on the international stage of world culture was heralded by the 1853 "New-York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations," the focus of the next gallery. The exhibition, also known as The New York Crystal Palace, was housed in a cast-iron and glass building on the present-day site of Bryant Park, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Both the structure and the exhibition itself were modeled on and intended to rival London's Great Exhibition of 1851 (the first world's fair). The 1853 exposition will be explored through American works that were displayed there, including the renowned Greek Slave (modeled 1841-43; carved 1847) by Hiram Powers, now in the collection of The Newark Museum; a rare suite of rosewood seating furniture in the Louis XIV style by Julius Dessoir, a gift in honor of the Museum's 125th anniversary in 1995, shown here for the first time; and a recently rediscovered Gothic-style carved oak bookcase (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) made by Gustave Herter, who was to become America's premier cabinetmaker and decorator by the end of the Civil War. O. A. Gager and Company, a New York City retailer, fascinated Crystal Palace visitors with an impressive display of wares made by the United States Pottery Company of Bennington, Vermont. Referencing the original 1853 presentation, the gallery will feature the 10-foot-high ceramic center monument as well as many smaller works, from the Bennington Museum and the Metropolitan's collection.

Photography, the New Medium
In counterpoint to the portrait gallery at the beginning of the exhibition, the eighth gallery will present early New York daguerreotypes and salted paper prints. Photography, which was introduced to America by Samuel F. B. Morse soon after its invention in France in 1839, made portraiture available to an ever-widening audience, which ranged from illustrious Americans such as Walt Whitman and P. T. Barnum (their daguerreotype portraits will be on view), to common folk such as a fireman with his hat and horn and a grocery boy with his parcel. Almost instantaneously, Americans embraced the new medium, with the result that soon there were more practicing daguerreotypists in New York City than in Paris or London. The exhibition will show works by well-known pioneers in the field - Mathew B. Brady and Jeremiah Gurney, among them - as well as lesser-known artists, including Gabriel Harrison and Samuel Root, whose contributions to this art form only now are being brought to public attention. Also on display in this gallery will be a selection of miniature portraits, a medium which preceded and was displaced by the advent of photography.

The Great Emporium
By the 1850s, New York boasted a dazzling array of high-quality wares, both produced locally and imported from abroad, which attracted people from all over the country. For those who came to shop, Broadway was at the heart of "the Great Emporium." Works on view in this gallery will suggest the panoply of luxury goods available in New York at mid-century. In the center of the gallery, two mannequins in silk day dresses, shoppers en promenade, will suggest a popular pastime as well as New York's reputation as a center of fashion. Among the highlights of this gallery are: a richly carved statuary mantelpiece depicting Paul and Virginia (characters from a popular French novel), commissioned by Hamilton Fish of New York (1851; Museum of the City of New York); brightly colored wallpapers; and a silver tray, pitcher, and two goblets (1856) presented by Temple Emanu-El to the Reverend Dr. David Einhorn (Congregation Emanu-El, New York).

Thanks to the artistic virtuosity of New York's large and skilled immigrant population, the decorative arts flourished in the Empire City. For example, the production of cut and engraved glass reached an impressive level of expertise, as demonstrated by a spectacular compote made for President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln at the Long Island Flint Glass Works of Christian Dorflinger of Brooklyn, New York (1861; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). High-style furnishings include works by two of the greatest cabinetmakers in the city in the 1850s: a resplendent carved rosewood sofa by J. H. Belter (ca. 1855; Milwaukee Art Museum) and an elaborately carved rosewood étagère by Alexander Roux (ca. 1855; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Among the other highlights of this gallery will be a small tabletop bookcase made in 1851 (Museum of the City of New York) by Thomas Brooks of Brooklyn as a gift from the firemen of New York to the famous soprano Jenny Lind ("the Swedish Nightingale") - whose nationwide tour was organized by the impresario P. T. Barnum - and a magnificent figured maple and rosewood reception room cabinet made by Gustave Herter (ca. 1860, Victoria Mansion, Morse-Libby House, Portland, Maine). Two ball gowns that were worn to the Prince of Wales Ball held in New York during his visit in 1860, both on loan from the Museum of the City of New York, will also be on view. A display of period jewelry documented as having been made in New York will include three pieces (a necklace and a pair of bracelets) from the seed-pearl parure acquired from the New York jeweler Tiffany and Co. for Mary Todd Lincoln, who wore them to her husband's inaugural ball in 1861 (Library of Congress).

The Empire City
By mid-century, New York had assumed the status of "Empire City," as the tenth gallery, displaying the large-scale 1851 map of New York City published by Matthew Dripps (private collection) and city views drawn from numerous private collections and public archives, will attest. Two of Frederick Law Olmsted's presentation boards (Municipal Archives) depict proposals for Central Park, which was under development at this time. Each juxtaposes Olmsted's "Greensward" plan of 1857 with Mathew Brady's photographs of the existing, somewhat barren topography, and Calvert Vaux's lush oil sketches that convey a vision of what Central Park was to become. Architectural drawings of churches, public buildings, and private houses, now in a variety of styles ranging from Gothic Revival to polychromatic Venetian, are intermingled with rare urban views captured in the new medium of photography, including early cityscapes owned by The J. Paul Getty Museum, many of them seen publicly for the first time. A stained-glass window (1844-47) by William Jay Bolton and John Bolton (St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn) represents the first major program of figural stained glass made in America; it complements Miriam and Jubal, the monumental organ loft window from the same church, which is on view in the Metropolitan Museum's Charles Engelhard Court in The American Wing.

The Triumph of American Art
By the mid-1840s, New York City was the center of the American art scene. American painting and sculpture was very strong and American artists had greater creative freedom than ever before. In the eleventh gallery, many of America's major artists of the period will be represented by signature works known to have been exhibited in New York City or owned by New York collectors. Among these diverse masterpieces will be Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), painted for the New York market by the Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham; William Sidney Mount's Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845; New York State Historical Association), painted on Long Island; New York Harbor by Fitz Hugh Lane, a Gloucester marine painter (1850; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (1859; The New-York Historical Society, on permanent loan from The New York Public Library). Sculpture ranging from Erastus Dow Palmer's White Captive (modeled 1857-58 and carved 1858-59; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), to the painted plaster Slave Auction by John Rogers (1859; The New-York Historical Society), to the cast bronze Indian Hunter by John Quincy Adams Ward (modeled 1857-60; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) are among the other works that will be in the gallery. Also on view will be engravings, etchings, and lithographs that explore the relationship between American painters and the art of printmaking, a medium that helped to make art available to a broader public.

The Heart of the Andes
The exhibition will culminate in the dramatic display of Frederic Edwin Church's monumental painting The Heart of the Andes (1859). This masterpiece from the Metropolitan's collection, an idealized depiction of an exotic South American vista, will be the sole work of art on view in the final gallery, presented as Church originally intended - as a single picture in a darkened room. The display will replicate the elaborate, freestanding frame of dark wood that the artist designed for the painting, intending to create the effect of looking through a casement window onto an actual landscape. During its 1859 New York debut, the painting was seen by no fewer than 12,000 viewers in the span of three weeks. Subsequently, it was shown to great acclaim in London, after which it was returned to the United States and toured the country until 1861, when the Civil War began. In addition, this remarkable painting was one of the works exhibited at the Metropolitan Art Fair, also known as the Sanitary Fair, of 1864, an event that was organized to raise funds for wounded Union soldiers, and which galvanized interest in establishing a municipal art museum. In 1870, Church helped to found that institution, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Catalogue and Educational Events
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, which will be available in both softcover and hardbound editions in the Museum's bookshops. The book, which will be published by the Metropolitan Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, will feature new material on the complex story of American art in the second quarter of the 19th century, discussed in 13 essays. Contributors include, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John K. Howat, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman, Departments of American Art; from the Department of American Decorative Arts, Morrison H. Heckscher, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Curator, and Amelia Peck and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, Associate Curators; from the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate Curator and Manager, The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, Kevin J. Avery and Thayer Tolles, Associate Curators, and Elliot Bostwick Davis, Assistant Curator; and, from the Department of Photographs, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Assistant Curator. Other contributors include Caroline Rennolds Milbank, fashion historian; Dell Upton, Professor of Architectural History, University of California, Berkeley; and Deborah Dependahl Waters, Curator of Decorative Arts and Manuscripts, Museum of the City of New York.

The exhibition catalogue is made possible through the support of the William Cullen Bryant Fellows.

A variety of programs will be scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition. In a two-day symposium, a roster of art historians, historians, and other scholars will discuss New York City's economic, historical, and cultural life in the period. A series of auditorium lectures by the exhibition's curators will be offered to the public free with Museum admission. Additional programs include subscription lectures and concerts, a free series of documentary films, poetry readings, and programs and materials for teachers, students, and families. A "student pass" program will provide all New York City schoolchildren and their families with free admission to the Museum. This program, which is unprecedented for the Metropolitan Museum in its scope, is also made possible by Fleet.

An audio tour, part of the Metropolitan's new Key to the Met Audio Guide, will be available for rental ($5, $4.50 for members).

The Key to the Met Audio Guide program is sponsored by Bloomberg News.

The Metropolitan Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org) will feature the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by John K. Howat and by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, who is Project Director for the exhibition and catalogue. Conservation work has been carried out by the staff of the Museum's conservation departments. Exhibition design is by Daniel Bradley Kershaw, Exhibition Designer; graphic design is by Sophia Geronimus, Graphic Designer; and lighting is by Zack Zanolli, Lighting Designer, all of the Museum's Design Department.

A related exhibition, Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and William Cullen Bryant, will be on view concurrently at The New-York Historical Society (October 17, 2000-February 4, 2001).

A flyer listing programs and resources at the Metropolitan Museum will also note other programs, exhibitions, and activities relating to Art and the Empire City.

August 22, 2000

Press resources