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Art & Culture
A gathering of turn-of-the-century paintings
Our cities began as muddy accidents.
Vinnie Ream sculptured Lincoln while she was still a teen-ager
President Lincoln had been dead more than three years in May of 1868, and the model of his statue still rested unfinished in young Vinnie Ream’s Capitol studio.
High on a hill above the Hudson River Frederick Edwin Church indulged his passion for building an exotic dream castle
“Sometimes the desire to build attacks a man like a fever—and at it he rushes,” the successful young landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church wrote from abroad to his friend and patron William H. Osborn in 1868.
By one of those happy accidents that nourish historians and magazines of history, an antiques dealer, sorting through the contents of the attic of a house in Mahopac, New York, in 1962, came across two notebooks that had apparently belonged to a Union soldier in the Civil War.
Kivetoruk Moses spent his youth and middle years zestfully hunting seal, reindeer, and polar bear through the Alaskan snows. He became rich trading in furs and sled dogs in Siberia and his native Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula.
In painting the romance of the American cowboy, Remington knew instinctively what would grip his audience and held it fast.
In the summer of 1885 a young artist from New York by way of Kansas City found himself resting by a campfire with a couple of prospectors out in Arizona Territory at a time when Geronimo was on the prowl, perhaps “even in our neighborhood.” It was about 9 o’c
Horace Engle’s An amateur photographer surreptitiously captured the mood of unsuspecting neighbors—with affecting results
“I photograph for my own pleasure and culture.” Thus Horace Engle—agriculturist, mineralogist, electrical “experimenter”—summed up what was an avid hobby for most of his eighty-eight years. Engle took his most unusual photos when in his late twenties in 1888-89.
The paintings of E. L. Henry:
As a child he sketched horses and wagons, buggies, boats, and scenes described in history lessons; during sermons in church he used the pages of prayer books and hymnals to draw the angels and the Giants in the Earth of the preacher’s text.
She was eighteen—pretty and sensitive, to judge by her photograph, taken in 1863. For many another girl, that age would have represented a new chapter in life in the form of a husband, children, a home of her own.
In a sense, the museum of the United States Military Academy was in existence years before the academy itself was founded.
Eighth in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE
On September 23, 1779, Captain John Paul Jones, wallowing along the English coast in the unwieldy Bonhomme Richard , met the British frigate Serapis .
The dusty, busy town of San Antonio, Texas, must have seemed an immeasurable distance from home to the twentyfour-year-old Jean Louis Theodore Gentilz.
Yanqui imperialismo, as any good Latin-American orator will tell you, is a pretty insidious affair.
Seventh in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE
At its northern end Manhattan Island shrinks to a spur of ground three quarters of a mile wide, bounded by the Harlem River on one side and the Hudson on the other.
For most Americans who pass that way today, Bridgeport, Connecticut, is a place to get through as soon as possible.
The man who paints his own likeness in a sense turns inside out the famous line of Robert Burns. He is given the gift to show others how he sees himself. This is a revelation of no small interest or importance.
A Portfolio of Paintings
Americans have always loved steam. We cannot claim the steam engine as our invention, but we did adopt it at once and brought it to the peak of its development.
Fifth in a series of painting for
AMERICAN HERITAGE
One of the ghastliest incidents of the Revolution took place at Groton, Connecticut, during the last engagement of the war in the north.
Fourth in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE
American spirits were at a low ebb as the year 1776 drew to a close.
An English artist recaptures on canvas the American ships that once ruled the seas
The Stag Hound (left) was an impressive sight whenever she entered New York Harbor; she was so heavily sparred she could carry nearly eleven thousand yards of canvas.
A visit to New York when it was little, not very old, and rather more attractive
New York during the Revolution was, a loyalist wrote, “a most dirty, desolate and wretched place.” And indeed it was. No other American city suffered as much from the war.
Third in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE BY DON TROIANI
Major General Nathanael Greene, commanding the Continental Army in the south, spent mid-March of 1781 trying to lure Cornwallis and his army into battle on advantageous ground.
Charles Marion Russell, born outside St. Louis, in Oak Hill, Missouri, of a locally prominent family in 1864, came west to Montana Territory four days short of his sixteenth birthday.
The proper Baltimore gentry of the mid-nineteenth century who paid Hans Heinrich Bebie to paint their portraits posed for the staid, rather dour man (or so he seemed) whose own self-portrait appears to the left.
The Kentucky rifle, which because of its astonishing accuracy earned. A substantial credit for American victories in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, was unknown by that name until after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
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