Putnam Foundation Collection > American

Albert Bierstadt
1830 - 1902
Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864
Oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 27 1/8 in.

Bierstadt earned his initial popularity with a series of landscape paintings of the Rocky Mountains. The works were based on sketches he made on a United States Government expedition engaged in mapping an overland route to the Pacific. In 1863, he set out with a group of artists on his second western trip to visit the valley of Yosemite.

This painting, done in his New York studio after his return, conveys the spectacular scale and natural majesty of Yosemite Falls, then thought to be the highest in the country. At the close of a day of sketching, the artists gather at their camp near a grove of oaks and cypresses. Light illuminates the falls and the meadow bordering the Merced River. In the right corner of the painting are a sketching umbrella, a color-box, and other objects that Bierstadt took on the expedition.

Thomas Birch
1779 - 1851
An American Ship in Distress, 1841
Oil on canvas
36 x 53 3/4 in.

Regarded as America's first marine artist, Birch is known for his paintings of the early American shipping industry and for a series devoted to the naval engagements of the War of 1812. He was also drawn to shipwrecks, the subject of some of his most distinctive paintings.

In this unusually large work, a violent storm has damaged the masts, sails, and rigging of a ship. As the crew lowers a lifeboat from the stern, a rescue boat approaches from the right, and a sidewheeler and another vessel come to the crew's aid from the left. The transparency and volume of the waves, the changing weather, and the other accurate details persuasively convey the plight of the ship and her crew. Birch was an admirer of Claude-Joseph Vernet, who also painted stormy coastal scenes and whose Seaport at Sunset is part of the museum's collection.

John Singleton Copley
1738 - 1815
Mrs. Thomas Gage, 1771
Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in

In 1771, Copley left his native Boston for a six-month stay in New York, where he accepted numerous portrait commissions. His first subject was Margaret Kemble Gage, the American-born wife of General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America (who had sat for a portrait by the artist in 1768).

Mrs. Gage wears a turbanlike swath of drapery, a silk caftan over a lace-trimmed chemise, and an embroidered belt - a Turkish-style costume that enhances her languid pose. Such clothing was fashionable at British fancy dress balls, but since masquerade balls were not held at the time in New York, Mrs. Gage would have had no occasion to wear the costume outside the studio. Her faraway gaze suggests pensive thought and intellectuality, implying that she was not preoccupied with trivial matters. This is the first painting in which Copley depicted a woman in such exotic clothing or in such a state of melancholic reverie.

Jasper Cropsey
1823-1900
Apple Blossoms, 1887
Oil on canvas laid on panel
12 1/8 x 21 1/8 in.

When he was only thirteen years old, Jasper Cropsey built an entirely handcrafted model of a house and entered it in a New York competition. Not only did he win an award at the 1837 fair of the Mechanics Institute of the City of New York, he attracted the attention of a local architect who offered him an internship with his firm. Cropsey's native artistic abilities were quickly recognized by his employers, and he was encouraged to work in watercolors and oils.

Cropsey completed his course of study and by 1843 was a practicing architect and artist. His mature painting style was influenced by two extended trips to Europe and the writings of philosophers and aestheticians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. By the 1850s, Cropsey began to paint what became his specialty - the New England autumn with its glorious and brilliant color. Throughout his life he continued to work in a careful, meticulous manner that no doubt derived from his early architectural training

Martin Johnson Heade
1819-1904
The Magnolia Blossom, 1888
Oil on canvas
15 1/8 x 24 1/8 in.

Heade initially became known for his landscapes and still lifes of Brazilian hummingbirds and orchids. Later in life, in 1883, he moved to Florida, which marked an important turning point in his career. Of the new flowers that interested him, the giant magnolia became the chief theme of his late still lifes. While Heade depicted the orchids growing in the jungle, he brought the magnolias indoors to be enjoyed.

In this painting, he gives the voluptuous blossom an added note of luxury by placing it on a generous and striking red cloth. The flower and leaves are perfect, without natural flaws that would mar their surfaces. The color contrasts, the crisp edges of both leaves and petals, and the realistic treatment of light give the forms a strong presence and heighten their symbolic sensuality.

George Inness
1825 - 1894
Ariccia, 1874
Oil on canvas
26-1/2 x 56-7/8 in

On his third trip to Europe, in the 1870s, Inness visited Italy for the first time. He painted primarily in Rome and its environs, finding many of his subjects among the scenic lakes and deep valleys of the Alban Hills and the hilltop towns. The rosy beige, tan, and white buildings of the town of Ariccia crown a ridge that stretches across the middle distance of this panoramic painting.

The geometry of the town is balanced by three horizontal elements: the long bridge in the foreground, the horizon, and the strata of thin clouds. Inness captures the characteristic light at the end of the day, a time of stillness and tender melancholy to which he returned in his later work.

Eastman Johnson
1824-1906
The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880
Oil on canvas
27 3/8 x 54 1/2 in.

In 1870, after searching for aspects of American rural life to use as subjects for ambitious paintings, Johnson began to draw inspiration from Nantucket Island, in Massachusetts. With this view of a cranberry harvest, he successfully realized his efforts to paint a celebration of New England outdoor life.

The work also marks a significant achievement in the history of American art. Using an evocative, rather than descriptive, technique, Johnson lavishes attention on the landscape, from the dry grasses of the cranberry bog to the distant and accurate view of Nantucket's spires and lighthouse. The principle focus of this scene washed by late-afternoon light is the configuration of pickers, and their poses and gestures. The standing woman in the center who looks at a boy carrying an infant to her creates a narrative suggesting that the artist recorded the scene as he witnessed it.

Fitz Hugh Lane
1804-1865
Castine Harbor and Town 1851
Oil on canvas
20 x 33 1/4 in

Lane was so inspired by the Maine landscape that it became the subject of much of his most memorable and intensely poetic studio work from the 1850s until his death. His home base for many of his visits was the town of Castine, which is visible in the distant of this view, across the harbor.

The artist imposes a sense of stillness and artificiality over the landscape and positions the ships in the harbor as if laying them out on a measured grid. Enlivening the quiet town and harbor is the almost theatrical expanse of sky, which contains a variety of clouds types and a range of light effects. The perfect orb of the sun, turned pink by veils of low-lying fog, serves as the painting's focal point.

Thomas Moran
1837–1926
Opus 24: Rome, from the Campagna, Sunset, 1867
Oil on canvas, 25 x 45 1/8 in.

Thomas Moran painted Rome, from the Campagna, Sunset in his Philadelphia studio in June 1867, one month after returning from his second trip abroad. The time spent in Europe gave Moran the opportunity to study thoroughly actual paintings of artists past and present, and to travel to Italy. Moran produced several sketches within Rome proper, but it was his experience in the Campagna, the pastoral landscape south of the city, that would inspire a dramatic transformation in his work.

Predating Moran’s first trip to the American West by just four years, Rome from the Campagna, Sunset both references the lessons the artist had learned to date and anticipates what is to come. In its sense of light and atmosphere, the cloud-filled sky evokes Turner, Claude, and Corot, artists who inspired Moran.

The dense, detailed foreground recalls the Pre-Raphaelite-influenced forest interiors that Moran painted in the 1860s. But it is the overall conception of space that not only sets this picture apart from his earlier works but makes this painting a telling and potentially unique precursor to the open vistas and monumental expanses of the western landscapes that would be the hallmark of his career.

Raphaelle Peale
1774–1825
Cutlet and Vegetables, 1816
Oil on panel, 18 1/4 x 24 1/4 in.

Raphaelle Peale was taught to paint by his father, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), an accomplished soldier, scientist, artist, and founder of a dynasty of early American painters. By the age of twenty-one, Raphaelle was recognized as America’s first—and leading—still life painter.

Although flowers may be thought of as the most typical of still-life subjects, Peale was far more interested in delineating the colors and textures of food. The majority of his paintings depict fruits, and such paintings would typically have been hung as decorations in dining rooms. Cutlet and Vegetables is one of only two known paintings by Peale of meat and vegetables, and this unusually well preserved composition is the largest of Peale’s known still-life panels. An extra strip of wood was attached to the main panel, most likely to further the illusion of a real table edge.

Peale and his family apparently thought well of the picture, which hung at the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, founded by the artist’s father, from the year after it was painted until the mid-nineteenth century.

John F. Peto
1854-1907
In the Library, 1900
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 in

Peto received his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he also exhibited his work from 1879 to 1887 and became friends with William Michael Harnett, a painter of illusory still lifes. Following a move to Island Heights, New Jersey in 1889, Peto ceased to exhibit and ultimately was forgotten.

In the early 1950s, UC Berkeley professor and San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein researching Harnett came to the realization that many of the works then attributed to the very popular and high-priced Harnett were in fact by another hand - a heretofore unrecognized artist named John Frederick Peto.

Benjamin West
1738 - 1820
Fidelia and Speranza, d.1776
Oil on canvas
53 3/4 x 42 5/8 in

West was the first American-born painter to study abroad. He left Pennsylvania for Rome in 1760, and then went to London in 1763, where he acquired an international reputation for his neoclassical style of history painting.

Here, West portrays a scene from The Faerie Queene, a poem by Edmund Spenser celebrating Christian virtues. Fidelia (Faith), holding the New Testament, and her sister Speranza (Hope) wait for the arrival of the Red Cross Knight. The Knight, representing the human soul, is brought to the House of Holiness by Una (Truth) through the stormy landscape at left. West depicts the two women in classical dress. Their graceful posture and elegant gestures reflect West's admiration of the classical sculpture and work of the Old Masters that he encountered in Europe.