Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
   In the 1870s, the complexion of the American art world was transformed. Technological advancements made travel simpler and less costly, and it was expected that any painter of consequence study abroad. Nevertheless, with the Centennial Exhibition and the great World’s Fairs, an astounding array of the latest painting could be seen without leaving home. The vast nation seemed smaller, as the railroads brought more and more art within easy reach. The industrial fortunes amassed during the Civil War supported new institutions, many for art, all across the country. Cincinnati boasted the new McMicken University with its School of Design (opened 1869; now the Art Academy of Cincinnati) and the Cincinnati Art Museum, founded in 1881 in a beautiful park setting.
   The School of Design, based on German and French academies, attracted and nurtured an extraordinary group of aspiring painters. A partial list of students in the 1870s reads like a Who’s Who of American painting: John H. Twachtman, Robert Frederick Blum, Joseph R. DeCamp, Edward H. Potthast, Elizabeth Nourse, and Joseph Henry Sharp, to name a few. All of these painters departed the city to continue their education in the East and abroad; all would climb to national stature.
   Frank Duveneck, from Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River, was the first American painter of note to study in Munich, Germany. He arrived in 1870, just as progressive painters were introducing a new painterly realism inspired by the Baroque masters. Their preference for unsentimental subjects and painting over draftsmanship profoundly impressed the Kentuckian, who made this vigorous style his own and brought it home. At first, the upstart was unwelcome; Cincinnati taste was too conservative. However, the city’s art mavens took note when leading Boston and New York critics hailed Duveneck the savior of American painting from a stale and uninventive state. Duveneck immediately attracted a boisterous troupe of rebellious students, the leading lights of the era, Twachtman, Blum, and DeCamp among them. Duveneck encouraged his students to find their own paths. He taught and painted in Europe until the death of his wife in 1888, then returned to Cincinnati to teach. Although his art evolved little as currents shifted, Duveneck earned high marks for the significance of his contributions to post-Civil War American painting and his inspirational teaching.
   The lure of Munich was relatively short lived. The Bavarian Academy quickly reverted to its earlier conservatism, and both those Americans who sought innovation and those who preferred more traditional approaches turned to Paris. Among the latter was Nourse, who resided in France as an expatriate. She won the favor of the French government with works like La mère (The Mother) which showcase her ability to portray the human figure with great conviction and skillfully evoke tender sentiment. More adventurous, however, were those painters who admired French Impressionism. The most inventive was arguably Twachtman, who successfully adapted aspects of progressive French painting to his own expressive style and an American fondness for unified tonal effects and suggestive moods. More conventional was Potthast, who, like the French Impressionists, delighted in painting ordinary people enjoying leisure activities and the dissolution of forms in brilliant sunlight.
   In late-nineteenth-century France, photography and Japanese art and culture pervasively influenced painters as they suggested alternatives to traditional perspective and exciting new ways to compose pictures. Blum was among the first American painters to travel to Japan, which he did in the early 1890s on an illustration assignment from Scribner’s. The Silk Merchant, Japan proffers an unusual composition, perhaps suggested by the cropping in photographs and the spatial organization of Japanese prints. Although less exotic, Potthast’s Long Beach likewise suggests the influence of photography, with its expansive empty foreground and cutting of figures at the edges of the painting.
   In the 1890s, a new wave of nationalism revived a call for typically American themes. Critics had grown increasingly weary of the many European landscapes and genre scenes that dominated exhibitions of American painting. Artists like Twachtman and Potthast, who brought new European modes of painting to America and adapted French style to American preferences and subjects, drew high praise.
Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938)
La mère (The Mother), 1888
oil on canvas
45 1/2 x 32 in.
Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903)
The Silk Merchant, Japan, 1890–93
oil on canvas
19 1/2 x 50 1/8 in.