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| Photo By Taft Museum of Art |
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"Paradise Rocks, Newport" is an example of James A. Suydam's fondness for coastal scenes.
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Among the pleasures of the appealing show now at the Taft Museum is its back story. Through wall labels and arrangement of the paintings we learn about a close group of mid-19th-century American painters, and particularly about the considerate and thoughtful man who collected his fellows' works and who was a painter himself.
James A. Suydam, whose art and collection make up most of Luminist Horizons, is not a name on everyone's lips these days although he was respected in his own time. He was, unknown to himself and his circle, later considered a Luminist painter. The term was coined a hundred years after the fact and is an example of art historians at work, tidying up the inventory, so to speak. The term helps us appreciate these paintings but is not essential to the story, and in any case not all the works on view fit the category.
A portrait of Suydam by his friend Daniel Huntington hangs at the exhibition entrance. The wealthy merchant, who left his commercial career to become an artist, was in 1862 a recognized professional recently elected to the National Academy. Suydam's unaffected dignity speaks to that accomplishment, but his troubled eyes and the work's stormy background reflect other concerns. The Civil War had just begun and was to occupy much of his thought for the rest of his short life. Suydam died at 46 in 1865.
The first gallery contains early works in which he experiments with his chosen subject, landscape. Hudson River School painting with its characteristic romantic elements certainly affected him, but he is moving in a slightly different direction. In the gallery described below we see where that direction took him.
Suydam finds his form in larger, mature works that he simplifies in order to present the very essence of coastal and salt marsh scenes. Tonal gradations and relationships of shape are subtle and effective. He is working in the style that came to be called Luminism. My favorite, perhaps, is "Paradise Rocks, Newport." Works by John F. Kensett, a friend and sometime mentor, are seen here, too, pointing up both shared and contrasting elements in the two men's work.
Two Cincinnati natives are seen nearby: Miner Kellogg's "Circassian Girl" and a nature study by Worthington Whittredge. Suydam was friends with each of them, traveled in Europe with Kellogg and was a neighbor of Whittredge in New York City's Tenth Street Studio Building, where many of the artists seen here were located. This was, it seems, a clubby group, in and out of each others' studios, most of them involved in the National Academy of Design. Suydam, who never married, bequeathed his collection to the Academy; now the National Academy Museum has organized Luminist Horizons.
Another section of the exhibition highlights the collection's American and European genre paintings, fully in the taste of the times. Suydam was a generous encourager of young painters and sometimes bought their works but also passed on to the Academy such American masterworks as Kensett's "Bash Bish," a textbook example of acute observation and was in fact painted on commission from Suydam.
The exhibition is a time capsule of the era. It closes with works reflecting the period's unsettled times, collected by Suydam even as he strove to present an alternative vision in his own art. (An interesting series of programs accompanies this show; see www.taftmuseum.org or call 513-241-0343.)
Taft Museum exhibitions always relate directly or obliquely to its own collection; Chief Curator Lynne Ambrosini finds interesting links here to the Museum's Duncanson murals. Another parallel can be seen between Suydam and the Tafts themselves, who began their collection some 50 years after Suydam started his.
These well-to-do collectors shared serious interest in art and the desire to leave their collections intact for the benefit of the public. If the Suydam exhibition seems at home at the Taft Museum it might be because the atmosphere is collegial. Grade: A-
LUMINIST HORIZONS is on view at the Taft Museum of Art through April 29.
