Maine Antique Digest, April 2017

Maine Antique Digest, April 2017 11-B

FEATURE -

11-B

in the gift book

The

Odd-Fellows’ Offering

Gift books were popular volumes intended

as Christmas gifts consisting of poetry and

short stories with prints after drawings and

paintings by American and European artists.

They were important sources of commissions

for American artists beginning in the 1820s

and lasting until roughly mid-century.

Researching Matteson’s sketchbook has

necessitated many trips to various institutions

and exercised my ability to evaluate visual

memories of his compositions, photographic

reproductions from the Internet or in books

and catalogs, and images from period

publications—comparing all against the

sketchbook drawings.

This sort of work

is extremely detail-oriented and requires a

prodigious memory. What’s life without a

good challenge, though, right?

While it is gratifying to have identified

many of the drawings, I can’t help but

speculate why several important paintings

spanning the same period are not represented

in the book, such as

Washington Delivering

His Inaugural Address

(1849, known only

from a print),

The First Prayer in Congress

(1850, known only from a print),

Lafayette

and His Family in the Prison at Olmutz

(1850,

Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania) and

Washington at Valley Forge

(1854, formerly

Sherburne Public Library). There is a second

sketchbook, location unknown, that may

include drawings related to these paintings.

Several questions arose during my

research. While some of Matteson’s figural

compositions use repeated models, showing

a lamentably wooden quality and the use of

stock melodramatic poses—clearly visible

The Spirit of ’76

—others are quite fluid

and lively.

Can we attribute this to different

periods, e.g., when he was young and then

in old age? Do paintings from the height of

his career show a greater ease and skill? Or

was available time a factor? For example,

perhaps sometimes he worked in a hurry and

other times he had sufficient time to realize a

quality product. Certainly, his many political

and community service commitments, not

to mention his six children, would have

consumed time he could have spent refining

his art.

Furthermore, there was no question

of Matteson’s traveling to Germany, England,

or France to study the old masters or enroll

in an art academy, as did many of his

colleagues.

Then there is the question of his

working methods and primacy of drawings

over paintings or vice versa. Donald Keyes

suggests that in some cases Matteson made

drawings that were turned into published

prints that only later formed the basis for

paintings, many showing compositional

differences from the original drawings.

The discovery of his Shakespearean

illustrations, together with Keyes’s list of

dozens of figural paintings, only perhaps half

known to us today, emphasizes that much of

Matteson’s oeuvre awaits rediscovery.

With

the reappearance of additional paintings,

perhaps more of the sketchbook drawings

may be identified. Certainly, the time I spent

researching the sketchbook has yielded

fascinating information about Matteson’s life

and artistic career.

What of the sketchbook’s fate? I have

offered it to several museums owning related

paintings, and we’re negotiating. It is not clear

whether the book can be kept intact or if it will

be broken up to sell the individual drawings.

Many dealers face this choice, and some

have no compunction about breaking up

books. Sometimes more money can be made

by selling individual drawings. This former

museum curator shrinks from that idea, yet

my primary allegiance must be to the book’s

owners. I have scanned each drawing and the

covers at high resolution, sharing complete

copies with the relevant museums, so that if

the book does become broken up, we’ll have

a full record of it for future researchers and

the owners.

Stay tuned for further news on the

Tompkins Harrison Matteson sketchbook.

the latter, the names of Matteson’s models are listed,

family members and townspeople. The sketchbook

indexes several historical paintings, including

John

Elliot Preaching to the Indians

(1849, Butler Institute

of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio),

Founding of

the Colony of Maryland

(1853, Annapolis Complex

Collection, Maryland),

Signing of the Compact

Aboard the Mayflower

(1853, location unknown),

and

Washington’s Farewell to His Officers

(1855,

Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana). Other

drawings are linked to his popular genre scenes,

including

Hop Picking

(1862, Munson-Williams-

Proctor Arts Institute),

The Turkey Shoot

(after

James Fenimore Cooper’s novel

The Pioneers

FenimoreArt Museum), and

Return from the Fields

Some drawings even provide us with the only visual

record of a lost painting, such as

Indian Basket Girl

(exhibited 1859, Pittsburgh Art Association).

A booklet offering Matteson’s biography and the

checklist for a retrospective exhibition organized by

the Sherburne Art Society in 1949 describes several

of the paintings referenced in the sketchbook.

This, combined with my new awareness of prints

reproducing lost paintings, enabled me to identify

several other drawings, including

The Broken

Pitcher

Rustic Courtship

, and

The First Ride

Most of the sketchbook drawings are limited to

outlines, with no shading or attempts at depicting

volume.

Indian Basket Girl

is an exception, since

limited portions of the head covering, skirt, and

baskets have been shaded. While many drawings

clearly reference a completed artwork, the position

of figures differs or accessories, such as guns, canes,

furniture, garments, and animals, are different or

absent.

For

A Sculptor’s Studio

and

The Turkey Shoot

several pages are related to each finished painting.

In the first case, Matteson provides two separate

drawings of the entire scene, supplemented by

two drawings of individual Erastus Dow Palmer

sculptures that appear in the finished painting but

in neither drawing.

For

The Turkey Shoot

, six

drawings are related, but only one presents a closely

related multi-figured composition. The others

are attempts to determine compositional details,

including the position of figures. Amusingly, one

drawing consists entirely of thumbnails of turkeys.

Given the sketchbook’s intimate scale, Matteson

probably used it to work out figure positioning and

backgrounds with an intermediate step being the

creation of larger, more fully rendered drawings.

In fact, I recently discovered two such individual

drawings in the collections of the Fenimore Art

Museum, one for

Rustic Courtship

and the other for

Washington’s Farewell to His Officers

. Certainly,

this progressive working method was common,

particularly before photography was available as a

tool.

At Princeton University, my attempts to identify a

group of sketchbook drawings representing figures

in historical costumes with headdresses and crowns

led to the discovery of a one-volume comprehensive

collection of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets with

40 illustrations by Matteson, previously unknown

to scholars of American genre painting.

Given

that his biographical sketches state that he was an

actor before becoming a painter and as a young man

filled in for several evenings for the principal role

Othello

and that several of Matteson’s paintings

present Shakespearean themes, this may not seem

remarkable. It is nonetheless remarkable for the

sheer number of drawings and the fact that these

commissions are not referenced in his contemporary

biographical literature.

There is no direct visual

correspondence between the sketchbook drawings,

the published Shakespeare drawings, and the known

Shakespearean paintings by Matteson.

Another discovery was that Matteson wrote

fiction. I found two short stories by him published

Sketchbook drawing for

A Sculptor’s Studio

, circa 1857, pencil on paper.

Sketchbook drawing for

A Sculptor’s Studio

, circa 1857, showing the Grace

Williams Memorial.

Sketchbook drawing for

Washington’s Farewell to His Officers

, circa 1855.

Sketchbook drawing for

Hop Picking

, circa 1862.

When riffling quickly through

the sketches, I quickly

recognized with elation two

drawings for a unique and

much-published painting

of sculptor Erastus Dow

Palmer in his studio.