The Magazine Antiques

Le Clear reportedly executed Interior with Por­­­traits about 1865 on commission from the elder brother of the two children—James (1831-1865) and Parnall (1833-1849) Sidway—who are shown posing in a skylit studio.8 The photographer is seen at the right, his head hidden under a cloth as he peers through the lens of his camera, which required a wet collodion process that became available in 1860. The setting is probably the space in New York's Tenth Street Studio Building that Le Clear leased when he moved to the city from Buffalo in 1863. The studio contains casts of the Borghese Gladiator and the Venus de Milo, prints and copies after the old masters, portraits, an easel, and a painted landscape backdrop. Yet the paraphernalia of painting is upstaged by the photographer and his gear and the landscape is merely a prop, not an awe-inspiring view. Interior with Portraits, however, does not simply tell a story of the triumph of photography over painting. In fact, by 1865, James Sidway was not a child but a volunteer firefighter in his mid-twenties, whose recent death in a hotel fire may have occasioned the commission for the painting. His younger sister, Parnall, who appears older than him, had died in adolescence, more than fifteen years earlier. Thus, Le Clear seems subtly to be lauding painters who, unlike photographers, can go beyond the limitations of technology to capture more than the moment at hand—in this case inventing a narrative and restoring life to individuals who have passed from the scene.

The setting for William Merritt Chase's Tenth Street Studio (Fig. 8), painted almost a quarter of a century later, is again an interior in the Tenth Street Studio Building, which had become America's artistic citadel and the perfect forum for Chase's professional ambitions. Indeed, Chase epitomizes the late nineteenth-century cosmopolitan American artist whose style was formed by instruction in European schools and association with foreign colleagues. To Chase and his American contemporaries, going abroad and gathering objects from abroad were interdependent, equally appealing activities. They displayed mementos of travel and their own pictures in their studios, where they hosted exhibitions, receptions, and private viewings for critics, potential patrons, and other guests.

In Chase's Tenth Street Studio, one of the earliest and most ambitious of his studio interiors, a fashionably dressed young woman lounges in a blue armchair, casually studying a print or drawing and chatting with Chase, who is almost lost in the shadows at the right. Although the artist shows himself holding his palette, as if caught in a pause from work, he leaves the narrative and the young woman's role vague. She might be a model for a portrait, a patron, or merely a friend.9 Chase enlivens the scene by placing the young woman off center, enticing the viewer's eye with her bright white gown. Using the napping dog as a fulcrum, he creates a droll balance between her slender vertical shape and the broad framed landscape at the left. By comparison with spartan mid-century workshops like the one Mount described in The Painter's Triumph or Le Clear showed in Interior with Portraits, Chase's luxurious studio was a showcase for his refinement and his association with tradition, a place for aesthetic display and contemplation, a retreat from urban confusion, and a paradigm of his period's internationalist taste. The studio itself and Chase's portrayals of it embodied the self-confidence of an artist who operated successfully on an international stage, painted a variety of subjects for diverse clients, and participated at the highest and most energetic level in an American art world, then characterized by new facilities for exhibition, new professional organizations and schools for instruction, and a new level of sophistication in art criticism and art appreciation.

Like Chase, George de Forest Brush enjoyed demonstrating his sophistication and his technical skill and using his works to advance the professional stature of American painters. Brush's Picture Writer's Story (Fig. 7) merges the theme of an artist at work with ethnography and allows him to demonstrate his command of academic principles, which he had mastered at the National Academy of Design in New York between 1870 and 1873 and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he worked, principally under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), from 1874 to 1879. Returning to the United States in 1880, Brush sought his subjects in the American Indian tribes he lived among in the early 1880s, and in the Canadian tribes he observed between l886 and l888. Native Americans offered Brush an opportunity to engage in the fundamental Beaux-Arts exercise, to paint the exotic nude. Again like Gérôme, Brush sketched during his travels, collected artifacts and possibly photographs for reference, and worked from models in his studio. The Picture Writer's Story portrays the interior of a Mandan lodge, where a painter describes to two younger tribesmen the battle he has documented on a buffalo hide, thereby passing down in picture and oral narrative a tale of his tribe's history and cultural heritage.10 Intending to express the universality of human experience in his paintings of Indians, as he explained in the Century Magazine in 1885, Brush quotes figures from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling of 1508 to 1512: the Libyan Sibyl, seen in reverse, becomes the picture writer, and Adam, from the Creation of Adam, is cast as the torpid young man at the right, who might be energized by hearing and seeing the picture writer's story.11 Many of Brush's later paintings cast members of his family in secular madonna and child guises and were obviously related to old masters. These paintings had the advantage of enhancing Brush's patronage among collectors who were acquiring old master paintings and who might be sympathetic to American pictures that were resonant in appearance and spirit, but they also aligned Brush incontrovertibly with the highest form of high art and amplified his prestige.

By 1900 impressionists such as Chase and academics such as Brush were challenged by the more realistic approach to scenes of everyday life espoused by the Ashcan school. And both groups of artists were forced to reckon with even more radical ideas in a huge exhibition first held in February and March 1913 at New York's Sixty-ninth Infantry Regiment Armory—the extraordinary Armory Show—which brought widespread attention to work by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and other European modernists.12 Despite the advent of cubism, fauvism, and abstraction—and the emergence of motion pictures as vehicles for telling stories—several successful American painters continued to explore established styles and narrative devices in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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