Maine Antique Digest April 2015

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Maine Antique Digest, April 2015 17-C
Notes
1. Jeanne Schinto, “Sold: Copy of the Law that Made the Dol-
lar Almighty,” Maine Antique Digest, July 2014, pp. 16-18-C.
2. Olinkiewicz had bought the collection barely three weeks
before the show. He had not intended to bring the material to
Allentown, but dealer George Sutton, from whom I have bought
frequently, convinced him that I would be the perfect individual
to catalog, interpret, and publicize the collection.
3. I later discovered that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts owns two works on paper by Plumb. A dozen or so Plumb
artworks crossed the block in January 2014 at Swann Galleries,
and a half-dozen pieces had sold in the previous 30 years. Inter-
estingly, the two earliest sales listed were in London. In 2005,
Plumb’s self-portrait A Votre Santé, which won honorable men-
tion at the 1878 Paris Salon, sold at Christie’s in New York.
4. The Salmagundi Club, founded in 1871, brought artists
together for informal sketching and conviviality. An active and
fascinating club to the current day, it is housed in a 19th-century
brownstone located on Fifth Avenue just north of Washington
Square Park. The library mugs are highly collectible; one of
Plumb’s mugs bears a scene titled Coming Thro’ the Rye, show-
ing mice gnawing their way through a loaf of rye bread. For a
discussion of the library mugs, see William H. Shelton, “The
Unique Art Sale of America,” Brush and Pencil, 15: 4 (1905),
pp. 245-50.
5. I am grateful to my parents, Harold and Isabelle Oaklander,
for helping me acquire the collection.
6. For instance, in 1889, Plumb’s pathetic painting The
Orphans , showing adult mice caught in a trap with young mice
hovering nearby, was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, which
purchased the picture.
7. Several of his portraits are in Sherburne, New York, public
institutions, including the town library.
8. Letters from his family are also in the collection, as well as
a smaller number of letters written by fellow artists.
9. A series of academy figures (drawings of the nude human
form from life) are also in the collection. These were done at the
École des Beaux-Arts, hence in Yvon’s class. H. Barbara Wein-
berg provides a superb discussion of the école in the post-Civil
War period, covering the concours des places, different courses
of instruction, and practices in Gérôme’s atelier, in The Lure of
Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and their French
Teachers , New York: Abbeville Press (1991).
10. Plumb rendered in watercolor some of the vignettes fea-
tured in his letters from Italy and Switzerland. In several cases
these replicate the thumbnail drawings.
11. Part of an original exhibition label remains affixed to the
back of the painting, bearing the artist’s title, Pickaninny. To
my eye the picture does not appear caricatured, and an Internet
search of the term pickaninny yields different uses and nuances,
some of them descriptive rather than racist. In general, the term
seems to refer to a diminutive size or a young child. Photographs
exist for a handful of other pictures of black children made by
Plumb. Some of these are sympathetic and charming, while at
least one is stereotyped and derogatory. These are best consid-
ered in the context of unfortunate but widespread contempora-
neous taste in art for caricatured images of blacks. We do know
that Plumb’s family members were ardent Union supporters
during the Civil War; the artist’s older brother Isaac fought with
great distinction and in 1864 died of wounds sustained in battle.
12. It is not clear whether Plumb engraved onto plates the ren-
ditions of his paintings as prints, but given his years of expe-
rience in the printing field, it is possible. If so, this would be
unusual; artists typically turned their paintings or drawings over
to a professional printmaker for preparation of the matrix and
the actual printing.
13. Hatch himself had studied under the master printmaker
and Hudson River school founder Asher B. Durand (1796-
1886). Since Plumb sat in the same office as Hatch and enjoyed
a cordial relationship with his employer, Hatch probably intro-
duced Plumb to many New York artists.
14. Details of how Plumb decided to become an artist are not yet
known. The genre and historical painter Tompkins H. Matteson
(1813-1884) was living in Sherburne during Plumb’s childhood
in the 1850s, remaining there until his death. Sherburne is a small
town, and Matteson and Plumb’s father, Isaac, were key figures in
the fire company and in village and county politics. Later in his
career, Plumb painted a portrait of Matteson from a photograph.
All of this suggests that Plumb was influenced by Matteson, but
Plumb’s biographical sketches and obituaries do not mention him.
One or two of the earlier works on paper in the collection suggest
the influence of the older artist, who had worked and studied art
in New York City as a young man.
15. As I cataloged the art, I kept hoping to find a portrait of
Gérôme by Plumb, but the nearest thing to it is a line draw-
ing reproducing a bust of the artist by sculptor Jean-Baptiste
Carpeaux.
16. Gary Erbe, a talented painter active in the club for many
years, kindly contacted the club’s curator and president on my
behalf to tell them about the collection, stressing its importance.
After sending a formal proposal, an on-site meeting took place
and a verbal commitment was made on the spot.
17. In 1954 the Sherburne Art Society presented a Plumb ret-
rospective at the Sherburne [New York] Public Library. A slim
catalog was prepared for the show. Examples of Plumb’s work
are owned by the library, the Sherburne Historical Society, and
the Chenango County Historical Society in Norwich, New York.
Many of these were donated by the artist or his daughter Marga-
ret, who was his primary promoter after his death.
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