Since its conception in the early 17th century, the Thanksgiving Day holiday has greatly evolved. Today, this holiday is associated with both the traditional elements of food and family, but also with new cultural events like football and holiday shopping.
While many Americans are under the impression that Thanksgiving has been celebrated every year in America since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, this is simply not the case. The Pilgrims arrived in the winter of 1620, which was extremely harsh and caused the death of nearly half of the passengers on the Mayflower. The original Thanksgiving celebration occurred the next year after a bountiful harvest. It lasted three days and included the pilgrims and neighboring Wampanoag Indians, who supplied much of the food.
This Thanksgiving feast was an isolated event for the Pilgrims. It wasn't for another 55 years, in 1676, that a second Day of Thanksgiving was celebrated in Charlestown, Massachusetts. It took over a century from that point for Thanksgiving to become a much more widely celebrated event. In 1777, all 13 colonies joined in a Thanksgiving celebration, which was mainly to commemorate the victory over the British at Saratoga. America’s first national Thanksgiving Day wasn’t held until November 26, 1789, when President George Washington proclaimed that it was to be an American holiday.
For collectors interested in artwork created by colonial and early Americans who lived in this time when American traditions like Thanksgiving Day were being formed, a unique exhibit will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through the end of November, 2002. More than 100 works in pencil, pen and ink, chalk, pastel and watercolor by some of this country’s most renowned artists is being featured in American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights from the Collection, 1710-1890. On view will be examples of portraiture by academic and folk artists, figure drawings, historical and literary narrative, landscape – including several early views of New York City – and scientific illustration. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s exceptional holdings of this material, the exhibition celebrates the publication of Volume I of American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes works by artists born before 1835.
The exhibition will offer a rare opportunity to see many of the Museum’s American works on paper, which – due to their fragile nature and sensitivity to light – are displayed only periodically. The often informal character or preparatory function of some of these works will lend insight into an artists’s creative impulses and working processes, yet the exceptional care and finish lavished on numerous others signifies the high regard many artists had for these ostensibly humbler media.
Echoing the chronological arrangement of the catalogues, the exhibition will begin with portraits by Henrietta Johnston (ca. 1674-1729), the first professional woman artist in the United States and also one of the country’s first pastelists, and will end with works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), who is best remembered for paintings in which subtle tonal effects are explored.
Considered the country’s most talented 18th-century artist, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) left America in 1774 to take the grand tour through Italy and France before settling permanently in London, where he studied with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Well-known as a portraitist, in England Copley became a successful history painter. The 1785-86 Study for “The Siege of Gibraltar”: Three Figures documents both his methods – the chalk drawing is squared and inscribed with notations for transfer to canvas – and the evolution of a monumental painting for which he sketched, altered, and edited groupings of figures over a period of eight years.
Founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was as imaginative and vigorous a draftsman as he was a painter. In The Fountain, he visualized a poem of the same title by his friend William Cullen Bryant, lamenting the loss of the natural landscape and the disappearance of the Native Americans from the eastern woodlands. In the deep forest interior Cole depicts tree trunks in the foreground bend aside to reveal the rocky mouth of the fountain of the title and the mortally wounded brave – in Bryante’s words, “slaking his death-thirst” – whose pose echoes its form.
In 1866, watercolor finally arrived in America as a high art in its own right with the foundation of the American Water Color Society, and the landscape painter William Trost Richards (1833-1905) emerged as one of the Society’s most highly regarded exhibitors. As such, his watercolors also became the first American drawings acquired by the Metropolitan, in 1880. His Rocky Coast of 1877 is a striking orchestration of heaving surf, stark geology, and tempestuous sky at Nahant, Massachusetts. With its large size, rich gouache technique, and fibrous brown paper support approximating an oil painting on canvas, it declares the artist’s ambition to raise the profile of the watercolor medium in America.
Whistler’s highly finished watercolor Lady in Gray (ca. 1883) – as refined a work as any of his canvases – depicts a proud yet fetchingly attired woman in a surprisingly small format (11-1/4 x 5 inches). The subject – whose identity remains unknown – emerges from a dark background in a dark dress, dramatically recalling the work of the Spanish master Velazquez.
Other artists whose works are on view include: the history painters Benjamin West (1738-1820), John Trumbull (1765-1843), Mather Brown (1761-1831), and John Vanderlyn (1775-1852); the prolific portrait painter Thomas Sully (1783-1872); the founder of the National Academy of Design, inventor, and daguerreotypist Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872); the landscapist Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) and John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872); the explorer-artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893); and the history painter and muralist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868).
For more information about the exhibit, visit the Metropolitan web site.
