19/2/23 - Acquisition - New Britain, Museum of American Art - A painter of the American West, considered one of the best landscapists of his time, Robert Seldon Duncanson was a self-taught artist born to an American father and a freed African-American mother.
Influenced by the first generation of the Hudson River School, and especially by Thomas Cole, he painted wild landscapes, animated by the peaceful meandering of a river and the jagged silhouettes of mountains. The latest acquisition of the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, made possible by a grant from the Robert C. Vance Foundation, bears witness to this legacy: this large landscape from 1870, painted in his Cincinnati studio at the end of his career, captures the grandiose beauty of the North American landscapes.
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- Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821-1872)
Landscape, 1870
Oil on canvas - 76.2 x 127 cm
New Britain, Museum of American Art
Photo: NBMAA - See the image in its page
Duncanson spent much of his career in Cincinnati, where he became friends with the painters Worthington Whittredge and William Louis Sonntag, of whom the museum owns several works. He undertook several trips with them; with Sonntag in particular, he left for Europe on the Grand Tour in 1853. He then travelled through North America, bringing back numerous studies from his various journeys, which he used to paint in his studio. During the American Civil War he was forced to flee to Montreal where he lived from 1863 to 1865, then left for the United Kingdom in 1865, visiting England and Scotland.
This painting complements the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, which has several landscapes from the Hudson River School, such as Thomas Cole’s The Clove, Catskills painted around 1826, Frederic Church’s West Rock, New Haven of 1849, and Albert Bierstadt’s Seal Rock of 1872-1887.
Duncanson also produced several still lifes in the 1840s.
The National Gallery in Washington thus acquired in 2012 a pyramid of pears, apples, grapes, walnuts, hazelnuts and peanuts (see news item of 16/2/12).