Urban Myths

Henri Rousseau, better known by some as “Le Douanier” or “The Customs Officer” (his occupation until his retirement in 1893), painted in obscurity during his lifetime but is known well today for his mysterious, almost childlike paintings of wonder such as Sleeping Gypsy and The Snake Charmer. Born May 21, 1844 in the Loire Valley, Rousseau’s most famous works present a strange jungle world, yet he himself inhabited the urban jungle of Paris for most of his career. Rousseau’s Self-Portrait of 1890 (above) shows him situated in a civilized setting, yet still retains the simplicity and unstudied charm of his other works. During his lifetime, Rousseau withstood the ridicule of other artists who couldn’t understand his primitive style. However, Jean-Léon Gérôme, an academic painter himself, gave tips to his friend Rousseau as “Le Douanier” pursued painting past the point of being a hobby into a true outlet for his unique perspective. As much as I love Rousseau’s dark jungles, I find it equally fascinating how he applied his unique vision to the real world around him, spying modern wonders with that same childlike fascination.

When Rousseau painted The Eiffel Tower (above, from 1898), Gustave Eiffel’s colossus was less than a decade old. Anyone who has visited Paris has some visual memory of the tower, either from a vantage point in the city or, if you’ve taken the ride up, from above, looking down upon Paris itself. The Eiffel Tower anchors Paris like a lighthouse shining its beacon to guide lost travelers home. With that powerful effect in mind, it’s fascinating that Rousseau chooses to literally cut the Eiffel Tower down to size in a painting named after it. He reduces the landmark to the size of a gift shop replica hanging from a key chain. Instead, the waterways of Paris dominate the scene as the Parisians who work the banks go about their daily jobs. Rousseau flips the idea of importance on its head in this painting. All adults “know” that the Eiffel Tower is the most “important” thing in this painting, but children don’t know such things. Children visually value the waterways and the workings of the people just as much, if not more, as Rousseau tries to show in this painting.

Before his death in 1910, Rousseau got to witness the advent of powered flight, which began with the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903. In View of the Bridge at Sevres and the Hills at Clamert, Saint Cloud and Bellevue (above, from 1908), Rousseau paints a Wright Brothers-style plane sputtering across the sky. Nearby, a type of dirigible flies. The early twentieth century saw a “golden age” of blimps and dirigibles. Races were even held above Paris using the Eiffel Tower as a turning stake. In the distance between the plane and the dirigible, a hot air balloon floats. The first manned balloon ride happened in Paris in 1783 in a contraption built by the famous Montgolfier brothers. Rousseau’s arrangement of these three flying machines suggests the advent of the plane and blimp and the decline of the hot air balloon technologically. (Thomas Eakins’ 1871 Max Schmitt in a Single Scull creates a similar hierarchy by showing older, slower watery craft in the distance behind the Schmitt’s sleek racer.) To Rousseau’s old, yet young eyes, these new flying machines must have seemed magical. Critics credit Rousseau for opening up avenues of seeing that paved the way for the Surrealists, but in his more “real” works of wonder, Rousseau showed us more importantly the value of seeing as a child sees and recognizing the magic all around us every day.

Basic Instinct

How must have Constantin Brancusi felt surrounded by artists and thinkers such as Marcel Duchamp, , Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and others all crying out for art to return to basics—namely the primal forces and simplicity they saw in African culture and other cultures they saw as untainted by Western civilization. Born February 19, 1876 in Romania, Brancusi lived the primal connection that these artists tried to assume through the hijacking of other cultures. Growing up in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Brancusi never forgot the native crafts and music of his homeland. Surrounded by Parisian Afro-philes, however, Brancusi couldn’t help but marry some of that cultural dialect with his own art in such works as The Sleeping Muse (above, from 1910). Looking at that work now, I can’t help but think of Man Ray’s 1926 photograph titled Black and White. Ray has his model hold an African mask to generate a comparison and contrast between the two “faces,” but Brancusi allows his face to stand alone. A nomad of sorts, Brancusi found himself at home with all cultures—first distilling them to their essentials and then binding them to his own.

After World War I, the Romanian government approached Brancusi to sculpt a tribute to those Romanians who had died fighting the Germans. The Endless Column (version 1 appears above, from 1918) finally rose in 1938, just as the next world war loomed on the horizon. Amazingly, The Endless Column lived up to its name and survived both the second World War and years of Communist rule continually threatening to take it down and erase its populist message. Unlike the Egyptian obelisks that celebrated the names of the powerful, Brancusi’s Endless Column celebrates the nameless dead who might otherwise be forgotten. Brancusi built the column out of a series of rhombus-shaped modules, giving the illusion of movement, as if some force were being pumped from the earth into the sky. Perhaps Brancusi, a spiritual man, imagined the life force of the slain Romanians rising from the grave through his column and ascending to the afterlife, maybe even to oversee and protect future generations of Romanians.

The PMA boasts one of the largest and finest collections of Brancusi’s sculpture in the world, including a copy of Brancusi’s famous Bird in Space (above, from 1923). Anne d'Harnoncourt, the PMA’s late director, loved Brancusi and took a personal interest in the development of the collection. Many press photos of Anne show her sitting in that gallery with Brancusi’s works peeking over her shoulder. The common misperception of Brancusi’s work usually comes from someone looking at a work such as Bird in Space and asking “Where’s the bird?” or thinking, “I could do that.” Brancusi’s art is more about spirit and thought than about subject matter and execution. Yes, the bird isn’t there. Yes, you could do that. But no, the bird is there in its simplest sense of a flight, more real than if you could see feathers and wings. And, no, you couldn’t do that, or at least not until Brancusi showed you the way how.

Merchant Marine

Thomas Chambers. Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812,1852. Oil on canvas, 34 ½ x 50 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource; Gift of Sheldon and Caroline Keck in honor of Elizabeth Broun, 1992.

How do you write about a painter about whom almost nothing is known? Can the work absent the biography provide us with satisfying answers? Kathleen A. Foster tackles these challenges in Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869, the companion publication to the exhibition currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The distinctiveness of [Chambers’] style as a painter, matched inversely by the vagueness of his biography, has made him a tantalizing figure,” Foster writes of the artist whom she has pursued since the 1990s, “at once one of the most widely collected American ‘folk’ landscape painters and yet one of the least studied and understood.” Putting flesh on the skeletal framework of what we know about Chambers through relentless sleuthing and an encyclopedic examination of what it meant to be a working artist in nineteenth century America, Foster schools readers not only on what kind of artist Chambers most likely was but also on what it takes to recover such lost souls from the depths of murky art history. Chambers’ works, such as his Capture of the H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812 (above, from 1852), captivate us with their otherness and strange modernity and draw us in to ask more. Foster provides more answers than we should expect.

Thomas Chambers. Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol, c. 1837-40. Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 30 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Foster begins her manhunt in Whitby, England, Chambers’ birthplace, where his brother George initiated him into the world of being a working artist taking on all manner of jobs to make a living. The theatrical and panoramic paintings of popular English entertainment of the time influenced Thomas and impressed on him the need to market your wares properly to survive as an artist. Chambers arrived in the United States in 1832, setting up shop in New Orleans for a few years. Moving to New York City, Chambers advertised himself in a local paper as “Thomas Chambers, Marine and Landscape Painter” ready to perform “Fancy Painting of every description done to order.” Chambers painted everything from furniture and signs to fine art for the home, including works such as Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol (above, circa 1837-1840), which recounts the story of a shipwreck that would have been familiar to his local audience. “With the practical outlook of a mariner,” Foster writes, “he includes the workaday salvage of the ship by the wreckers who have pulled alongside… [yet] within a romantic structure in which a bystander contemplates, under sunny skies, the aftermath of the most recent episode in a timeless cycle of tragedy and recovery.” This tension between merchandising and higher artistic aspirations energizes much of Chambers’ art as he continually pursued a buying audience, often physically, as shown by moves from New York City to Baltimore, Boston, Albany, and New York City, again, before returning to England in his final years. Foster identifies Chambers’ contemporary audience as “prosperous, bourgeois householders attentive to the latest urban style… evidently attracted by a novel, fashionable, prestigious, and cosmopolitan item: the original framed oil painting of a landscape or marine subject.” Upwardly mobile Americans looking to acquire the trappings of success sought out artists such as Chambers, who supplied them with an affordable touch of class. Chambers, Foster believes, was “the first American painter to bring professional landscape and marine easel painting to an audience beyond the metropolitan elite,” thus democratizing art for the still-young democracy.

Thomas Chambers. The Constitution and the Guerrière, c. 1840-50. Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 x 34 1/4 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962.

Capitalizing on the continued interest in the War of 1812, Chambers painted multiple versions of The Constitution and the Guerrière (above, from circa 1840-1850), the battle that made “Old Ironsides” a household name. Chambers painted several different naval conflicts from that war, always looking to open up new markets or fulfill new commissions. Chambers played to the wishes of his audience and his own tastes rather than slavishly copy reality. “Sailors might have been disdainful, considering the nonsensical signal flags, out-of-scale vessels, and perilous courses depicted,” Foster muses, “but perhaps they enjoyed [Chambers’] spirit,” as adventuresome in paint as the events he depicted. To expect properly rendered ship’s rigging from Chambers work seems as silly as to expect anatomically correct animals in the work of Edward Hicks, an artist from the generation just before Chambers’. N.C. Wyeth actually owned two naval battle scenes by Chambers, proving that their inner spirit continued to entrance kindred spirits even a century later. Although not truly an illustrator like Wyeth, Chambers scoured popular magazines and newspapers for subjects for his brush, illustrating the images that were fresh in the mind of his buying audience.

Thomas Chambers. Niagara Falls from the American Side, c. 1843-52. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

Although Chambers painted both marine and landscape scenes, he clearly identified himself as a marine painter. The few works that bear his signature are marine paintings. Chambers might actually have gone so far as to create aliases under which he could sell his landscapes. Another factor that may have led Chambers not to place his name on such works as Niagara Falls from the American Side (above, circa 1843-1852) may have been his “borrowing” of such subjects from prints. Foster sees the fact that Chambers never copied one of Thomas Cole’s compositions as a sign that he respected the older artist’s work too much to mimic it. Although Chambers grew up in an art world that viewed such copying as a long-accepted practice, he practiced long enough to reach a time when such copying was looked down upon. “The issue of originality defines a sea change in that world during [Chambers’] lifetime that would forever disqualify him as a so-called fine artist in the eyes of his contemporaries,” Foster writes, explaining in part how Chambers fell into obscurity over time until his rediscovery in the middle of the twentieth century.

Thomas Chambers. Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?], c. 1843-60. Oil on canvas, 18 1/16 x 24 3/8 inches. Indiana University Art Museum; Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection.

In the late 1930s, art dealers Albert Duveen and Norman Hirschl discovered a signed work by Chambers that led them to connect that one work to similarly painted works that had also emerged around that time. In 1942, they exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City 18 works attributed to Chambers, hailing him as the “First American Modern” and “The American Rousseau” for his unique style so similar to the primitivism valued by modern art movements. Just as Herman Melville resurfaced as the quintessential American novelist in the 1920s, Chambers resurfaces from obscurity as an “authentic American artist” according to critic Thomas Craven and others. Ironically, Foster points out, the “flatness, unnatural color, expressive distortion, abstraction, and simplification” of such works as Landscape with Lake and Monastery [Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo?] (above, circa 1843-1860) that Chambers’ contemporaries “deemed bad in Chambers’ day… are exactly the traits that… make him a model of liberated individualism and originality” for a modern audience. Foster proceeds to prick this tidy balloon of posthumous acceptance by viewing the modern reading of Chambers as being as much a misreading of his art as the reading of his contemporaries. “Laundered, over time, of the class and guild prejudices that colored the opinions of Chambers’ own contemporaries,” Foster explains, “his work comes to us with nuances of subject matter and context likewise lost, and a measure of nostalgia and condescension added, as we smile over imagined naïve and innocent citizens of the past decorating their fancy parlors.” Foster’s coup de grace arrives in the form of Thomas Kinkade, whom Foster evokes as a possible analogue to the case of Chambers—an artist who played to the taste of his time in his own style despite critical approbation. “[I]f it is useful to call Chambers the ‘First American Modern’ in 1942,” Foster asks, “is it helpful to understand him as the ‘first Thomas Kinkade’?”

One of the finest prose stylists in art history writing today, Kathleen Foster delivers mightily with Thomas Chambers. As shocking as including the “Painter of Light™” in her argument seems, Foster makes it not only provocative but illuminating. Like Chambers’ art itself, Foster easily crosses all strata of culture, high and low, including Walt Disney’s Fantasia and PBS’ Bob “Happy Little Trees” Ross, to give a fully rounded recounting of what Chambers’ life most likely would have been like based on the sketchy evidence that survives. Foster’s presentation of her Sherlock Holmes-ish detective work and deductions are exhaustive without being exhausting, lightened by the twinkling wit of her writing and her impeccable eye for images that illustrate Chambers’ strengths. If you should ever fall into obscurity, pray for someone like Kathleen Foster to pull you out of it. Thomas Chambers recreates a little-understood era in early American art and exhumes an artist both representative of that time and well welcomed in our own.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of Kathleen A. Foster’s Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808-1869 and for the images from the exhibition.]