Landscape With Rainbow-Robert S. Duncanson, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

ROBERT S. DUNCANSON: EARLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTIST

There were several communities of free blacks throughout the north and south in antebellum America. The communities supported a number of thriving businesses from doctors and barbers to ministers and pharmacists. There were even a number of artists to come out of these communities at the time. In some cases, like Robert Duncanson, they were not only pioneering African-Americans, there were pioneering Americans regardless of race.

Duncanson was born of freed blacks in New York in 1821. His grandfather had been a freed slave how started a carpentry trade that would stay in the family for at least three generations. At some time in his youth, his parents split and he lived with his father on the Canadian side of Detroit. There, he learned to paint and decorate houses. By the time he turned 20, he had moved in with his mother in Cincinnati with the hope of learning more about art than just painting decorative fruit onto living room moldings. He was a restless painter, starting out as a painting portraits before later switching to genre, still life and landscape painting. He taught himself by copying original work and may have befriended or studied with William Sontag or T. Worthington Whittridge, both well known Hudson River School painters living in Cincinnati. Portraits were his bread and butter and he had a reliable clientele among the Cincinnati abolitionists but his restlessness led him to move repeatedly between Ohio, Detroit and Canada.

Once the Hudson River School became popular, he developed a real passion for the work and became a diligent landscape painter. He also earned a valuable commission painting murals in the home of the wealthy Cincinnati landowner, Nicholas Longworth. It is now the home of the Taft Museum of Art, where the murals are still on display and have recently been restored. He also displayed his work in local and regional shows as his reputation spread.

Vesuvius and Pompeii-Robert S. Duncanson, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Once the Civil War broke out, he left for Canada. There, he worked with a number of Canadian artists and to this day, his importance to Canadian art is recognized. But his constant restlessness took hold again and he left for England. There he toured and promoted his work, where he dined with famed poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and received praise in the London Art Journal. Once the war was over, he returned to Cincinnati.

His last years were very productive but by the end of the decade, he was showing signs of mental instability. He had developed violent mood swings and had started seeing hallucinations. It is speculated that the lead in oil paints available at the time, may have been the cause of his problems. His last months were in Detroit where he was both committed in a mental hospital for a time and where he was also organizing a show of his work. Sadly, he died after a violent seizure, at the age of 51.

Despite the generalizations of history towards slavery, every person’s situation is unique. Duncanson, despite our history of slavery, was a very successful artist in his day, and if his work seemed to disappear in time, it had as much to do with our historical neglect of the Hudson River School and of realism in general. Since the 1920’s there has been a continued interest in the work of the Hudson River artists and in African American artists. IN the past several decades, there have been periodic shows of Duncanson’s work and many of them can be seem at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Tragic Prelude by John Steuart Curry courtesy of the State of Kansas

REGIONALISM

French Impressionism ushered in a brave new world of art and within fifty years of its beginnings, the art world was watching the rise of landscape paintings by Picasso and Matisse. The center of this creative hurricane was Paris but its effects could be felt in other European cities like Rome, Berlin and Vienna.

While the cities of Europe were swept up in the artistic impulses that started in Paris, America seemed to lag way behind. Even though a few brave Americans were collecting modern art, the vast majority of Americans thought that the latest European art trends were simply wacko. It wouldn’t be until the Armory show opened in New York in 1913 that America got a big look at 50 years of artistic change. From that show, an artistic battle was played out for the next four decades over what qualified as art: basic American realism or European modern art.

While a number of American artists latched onto the modern art movement, almost all of them were playing catch up with the latest artistic trends and it wouldn’t be until Hitler marched across Europe at the end of the 1930s that some of Europe’s artists arrived in America’s shores to teach us the art of abstraction.

At about the same time, Regionalism sprang up in Middle America. It was a conservative art movement, based not only on realism but also on aspects of Midwestern life. Much of it was couched in a subtle kind of irony that seemed to go over many of the heads of the people who championed the work. In other words: they didn’t get the joke. Many people still don’t get the humor and yet it created some of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century, including Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

Arts Of The West by Thomas Hart Benton, courtesy of the New Britain Museum of American Art

There were a number of regionalists but only three famous artists are repeatedly mentioned: Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. The basic conservative assumption was that these men fought for conservative artistic ideals at a time when American art was being attacked by the modernists but every one of the Regionalists was well trained in the latest theories of modern art. Almost all of them were schooled in New York and studied in Paris. Whether they agreed with these new styles, or didn’t, they were not innocents and a quiet wicked humor ran through much of the work. Curry would run the art department at the University of Wisconsin. Wood’s American Gothic became so iconic it was parodied as much as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Benton taught at the Student’s Art Union in New York. One of his pupils was Jackson Pollack.

We need to understand Regionalism better. It isn’t about old ladies and manicured midwestern lawns. It’s about history and how we remake our past. It deeply engrossed in social criticism whether concerning the inflexible judgments of small minded people or issues of race. It uses mythic themes to talk to a world of conservative people without casting hard dispersions upon them or preaching over their heads.

Regionalism lost a lot of ground during the years that America fought in World War II. By the time the war was over, the style seemed like yesterday’s news and artists like Benton had to step aside while those like Pollack took art into other new directions and showed the world that America could create modern art.

Birthplace of Herbert Hoover by Grant Wood, courtesy of the Des Moines Art Center

While Grant Wood’s American Gothic has a world famous home at the Chicago Art Institute, many of his works can be found throughout his home state of Iowa, including his painting Birthplace Of Herbert Hoover, which is at the Des Moines Art Center. John Curry’s work can be found all over the Midwest, but Tragic Prelude is part of a famous mural found in the Kansas State Capitol. Thomas Hart Benton’s work can be found through the United States, especially in his hometown of Kansas City, but the New Britain Museum of American Art, in Connecticut, exhibits his series on the Art in America, including the Arts Of The West.

Self Portrait by Vincent Van Gogh, courtesy of the Chicago Art Institute

In recent weeks, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have been making the rounds of the bookstores, radio talk shows and university lecture halls promoting their new book on Vincent Van Gogh, which is now a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. In late 2011, a segment spotlighting the book appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes concerning their theory that Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was accidentally shot. With the release of this book, a lot of new thoughts concerning the artist will be offered to us and we will get a chance to reevaluate his life and gain some added insight into the puzzling nature of this world-famous man.

Everyone now believes in the importance of Van Gogh’s artistic career but how we choose to assess both his talent and his life really determines how we measure his contributions to art. More than any other artist, the wreckage of his life colors the way his work and his gifts are portrayed. Even when we assess the work of his friend, Paul Gauguin, we can separate his brilliant symbolist paintings from the way he abandoned both his career and his family. With Van Gogh, we still can’t separate his loneliness, his manic depression, his self mutilated ear or his suicide from his work and because of that, the world still holds him in a special kind of artistic embrace, wishing for a happier ending.

Naifeh and White, as biographers and historians, can not rewrite history but they have shined a lot of light upon areas of his life that have been not thoroughly examined in decades. As with all biographers in our clinical age, they have sorted through the records of his life and found a form of epilepsy that may explain the difficulties of his social life and personality. But it’s what they found concerning his suicide that may give his troubled life a little bit better closure.

Apparently, the biographers have found that the stories relating to his suicide were shot full of holes and their credibility leaked like a sieve. The mythology of his death suggests that after working on a painting of crows flying over a field, he shot himself and dragged his dying body back to town and to his room. Kirk Douglas portrayed it in all its anguished Technicolor. A trip like that is nearly Herculean but everyone, including his brother conceded that Van Gogh was too lonely, too impoverished and too desperate to continue his life and suicide was thought very possible. What else could it be? And after a century and a quarter, we still struggle with the loneliness of a desperate painter, at least, until the release of this new book.

Wheat Field With Crows by Vincent Van Gogh, courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum

As the authors have explained on various talk shows, it seems that decades after the incident, an elderly French gentlemen came forth with a startling confession. Apparently, as a youth, he and a small gang of teens regularly harassed Van Gogh and in one incident, one of the boys waved a gun and accidently shot him. Van Gogh could not bring himself to incriminate the boys and died in silence. How these new revelations will affect the way we see his work is uncertain but one small artistic theory will change, we shall stop looking at his painting Wheat Field With Crows as some kind of suicide note.

This book is bound to be the most talked about art book of the year, so if you are interested in Naifeh’s and White’s biography Van Gogh: The Life here are two links:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/van-gogh-steven-naifeh/1100739678?ean=9780375507489&itm=3&usri=van+gogh

http://www.amazon.com/Van-Gogh-Life-Steven-Naifeh/dp/0375507485/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329096645&sr=1-1

The Bermuda Group by John Smibert, courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery

AMERICA’S FIRST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST/JOHN SMIBERT

In the American colonies’ first hundred years or so, the artists that painted in the colonies where itinerant limners, men who traveled throughout the area, painting portraits, sometimes of prominent people but usually of the unknown settlers of the young colonies. The limners not only painted portraits, they decorated houses, embellished furniture, paint decorations on the sides of wagons and carriages and provide other ornamental needs. John Smibert was the first artist in the colonies to become a professional artist and to market himself as such.

Smibert was a Scot who managed to train as a coach painter in his teens. Decorative work such as family crests or features such as hounds or banners could be painted onto coach doors or upon the coach body. The craft was a nice way to introduce a person to the skills of painting. Smibert eventually trained as an artist in London, primarily working as a copier of oil paintings. Those paintings were sold much as posters of famous works are sold now. After a tour of Europe, painting in Paris and Rome, he returned to London to attempt to make a career of art.

In London, Smibert was a fairly successful artist, painting over twenty-five portraits a year. He became a member of the Virtuosi Club and it was within this group that he hooked up with George Berkeley, an Irish divinity student who had dreams of establishing a mission college for the indigenous people of Bermuda. Through the Virtuosi Club, Berkeley organized a group to act as his first teachers, including Smibert as the school’s professor of art and architecture.

The group set sail for America, in hopes of finding the additional funds needed to establish the college. While waiting in New England, Smibert finished a group piece he had been working on called the Bermuda Group. Started in London, the painting shows a number of members of his sailing companions in various informal poses. Smibert can be seen on the very left of the group. After spending the winter in Rhode Island, waiting for additional funding, Smibert left for Boston, hoping to keep himself employed as an artist. There, he displayed his work, which included several Boston portraits, some of the masterpiece knock offs that he had painted in Europe and, of course, the Bermuda Group painting. As the first art show in America, it was a big success.

Within in a few years of his arrival, Smibert had married Mary Williams, a young lady who had sat for a portrait the year before. He also set up an art shop, selling art supplies, including the grounds for pigments, oils, brushes, some of his artwork and even imported prints from Europe. When his friend Berkeley returned to London having washed his hands of the Bermuda college dream, Smibert stayed in Boston as the town’s preeminent artist. Smibert also became connected with the Faneuils, painting portraits of members of the family and eventually designing the original version of the famous hall that bears the family name.

It was through Smibert that the next generation of artists, most of them based in Boston, would develop their love of art and through him, people like John Trumbull would also make their name in American art.

A neighborhood of cape cods can be seen against a late fall sky

CAPE CODS AT THE END OF FALL; canvas size: 18″ x 36″

Two rows of small, Cape Cod houses at the end of fall are shown in this cityscape.  They are on either side of a circular road that is displayed from one side.  One row of houses line the horizon of the painting while a few houses from the other side can be seen on the right.   The foreground of the painting shows two roads, one curving back into the painting while the other slips out the two sides. The road that lines the horizon of houses is left can not be seen.   The lawns are starting to betray a rusty winter yellow-green and the trees are bare.  A pale winter orange sun highlights the trees and the haze of the sky as the sun sets.

Once fall sets in, the time that I have to paint drastically shrinks.  After work, I need to get to the locations fast and have the patience to work on the picture over a few years.  That is what happened with the painting.  It was a location near my daughter’s junior high school.  The circle streets allow the houses a variety of ways to display the fading light.  Usually, houses are lined in rows and the streets are like tunnels with houses on each side.  This was something different – open and well lit.

There are usually a set of colors that that summer landscape displays; a rich green, a brilliant chartreuse, bright blue sky and deep blue violet shadows.  Sometimes a haze can also be captured.  The late fall and early winter have other colors.  The grass starts to loose it’s vividness and shows an oxide tone underneath the green.  This oxide shows really well in the morning and evening light.  There is also an orange cast in the sunlight as it sets.  You can see this in the late summer evenings but it is much more noticeable in the late fall.  It shows in the trees and the sky.  It shows in the light that illuminates some of the houses.   I find a real beauty in this kind of light but it can also seem a little melancholy as the light of day passes so quickly.

What is barely noticeable in the painting is that there are a few displays of Christmas ornaments in the painting.  I put them in because they were on display and a few bits of red were already floating around in the painting: the red roof on the house on the right, the taillights of the closest car and a barely noticeable American flag hanging from a house.  There is one house with random dabs of red.  Those were the decorations.  There are also a few red touches on someone’s bushes.  Those were red-ribboned wreaths.  Christmas was nearer than you think.

IS THIS THE NEW MONA LISA?

I am not a person who likes to drain a subject dry but in the past week or so, since I wrote a blog entry on NOVA/PBS’ documentary on an attempt to validate a sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci, the Renaissance painter has become recurring news as PBS has another Da Vinci program in the wings and a book by Toby Lester on Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man has just been released. On top of all that, a fascinating news story appeared highlighting the Western world’s most famous painting, Mona Lisa.
All of this starts with an upcoming show at the Louvre that is centered on Da Vinci’s painting of St. Anne. Mona Lisa is kept in the same room, barely visible in an air-controlled box, a wood panel painting on life supports. Also invited into the show is a painting from the Prado in Madrid, known as the Prado Gioconda. This painting has been at the Prado for a long time. Sometimes it was on display and at other times it was retired to the back room collection. For a long time, the painting had a black background, giving the painting a serious, subdued look and has long been assumed to be one of many later century copies of Mona Lisa, maybe painted by an admiring artist while it hung in the Louvre.
In preparation for the Louvre show, the staff at the Prado had their Gioconda cleaned and to their surprise and delight, another background was found under the black overcoat that was very similar to the one found on Da Vinci’s original. This was a cause for celebration and research. Further analysis found that the painting was not a later century painting but was created in the early 1500’s, possibly by a pupil of Da Vinci’s named Francesco Melzi. Further speculation suggests that Melzi and Da Vinci may have worked on their pieces at the same time.
Lisa was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo and it was the word play involved with their family name that gave her the name of La Gioconda. Lisa was a new mother at the age of 22 when she sat for Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci had spent his adult life as a well-regarded painter although he rarely finished his work. As a teen, he worked in the studio of Verocchio for possibly ten years before setting out on his own, but once he did, he preferred to spend his time conceiving engineering schemes and designing weaponry for the famous warring families of northern Italy, especially the Sforzas.
When Ludovico Sforza lost out in a power struggle with Francis I of France, Leonardo, then in his middle age, started to drift and settled for a time in his old stomping grounds of Florence. It was there that he met up with Giocondo and painted his young wife.
The paintings have differences. Melzi’s background is more dramatic but many of the same features appear, including a winding path and river. Both are very similar yet their differences suggest that the Prado work is not just a copy. There are also obvious differences between the way that Lisa looks in the famous Da Vinci painting and in this Prado alternate. DaVinci painted his work on poplar, a wood that takes paint and primer well. But 500 years of existence has cracked the wood in many places, making the painting almost too delicate to clean, and leaving us with a painting that has yellowed from varnish and darkened with age. This new study shows a young woman in the same dress and veil, but now sensuous with color: rosy cheeks and lips and a gorgeous undergarment that begs the world to see the original in such a red. To everyone’s surprise, Lisa also has eyebrows. And in the background, we now see a landscape in blues, grays and ochres.
This gift from the Prado may look like a publicity stunt but what is revealed is so remarkable that this rises well about publicity for an upcoming show and instead reveals some major secrets of art history.

A Sunset, Bay Of New York by Sanford Gifford, courtesy of Everson Museum of Art

THE LUMINISTS

The first wave of Hudson River artists were a handful of men who traveled up the river to visit and paint the sights as the Hudson coursed through the mountains, palisades and hills of upstate New York. But once the Erie Canal and the railroads brought a vast wealth to New York City, a second and much greater wave of Hudson River School landscape artists flooded the American art market.

Until the 1840’s, the American art market catered to portraiture, art that glorified the wealthy and made a handful of artists well known. But once photography became profitable and quite a novelty, the market for portraiture crashed under the weight of silver gelatin plates and bottles of developer. The Hudson River School had been a prominent if minor art distraction in early America but as portraiture dried up, landscapes became a hot art item. Suddenly, New York was flooded with young art talent traveling up the Hudson to paint the Adirondacks, the Catskills, Kauterskill Falls and the attractive lakes and forests of upstate New York. The number of artists became such a glut that some set out for other areas, such as the South, West and Midwest of America, Mexico, Europe, the Caribbean and even South America, all in hope of capturing the right view and selling it for a premium in New York.

So much landscape art was available from these artists that some of the styles became grouped into similarities, including Luminism. Luminism was not a defined school of art. There were no strict rules, but the name does imply the style’s main interest: glowing light. While many of the Hudson River artists sought to capture the New York wilderness in as much detail as could be highlighted in the painting, the Luminists sought light. While they were still interested in painting detailed landscapes, they loved the glow of fog, the shimmer of reflected light off of water and the glorious color of a setting sun. For them the best places for that was near Long Island Sound, along the Atlantic, and where the rivers emptied into the ocean. Ships, shoreline rocks, coastal shores shrouded in mist and a glorious setting sun reflecting off the water all became trademarks of the first Luminists. Although their interest was natural light, because of their locations, the first Luminists also became marine painters, capturing the likeness of boats and lighthouses as well as the shimmer of a calm bay.

Soon, that changed as the New York artists set out to paint the world. Glorious paintings of volcanos in South America, coastlines in Mexico, ancient ruins in Italy and the mountains of the Rockies were all painted with sunlit haze or the fading orange glow of sunsets splashing over the scene. Artists like Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford, Enoch Perry, Thomas Hill, Frederic Church and so many others went to extremes creating visual masterpieces of landscape art. It all was just visually colorful and dishonest enough that the paintings can seem surreal. Then again, it’s not much different in this age of Photoshop.

Luminism faded just as the French Impressionists became interested in light, but this time, instead of smooth glassy touches of visual glory, the Impressionists chose to keep their colors natural and, instead, used their brushstrokes to create a sense of marvel.

An evening view of a backyard garden backed by two small garages.

BACKYARD GARDEN
18 x24
1996

Backyard Garden is an evening painting of two garages with garden in front of them. Also included in the scene is a pile of logs stacked behind one garage and a garden of lilies behind the other. Two maple trees, one very big and one still growing fill the sky.

Every artist has to start somewhere. I started here.

I had been plein air painting for only a short time, most of it experiments in technique and in coordinating the processes involved in plein air. A plein air painter not only paints outdoors, he has to carry equipment with him (or her) and tend to buying supplies. A plein air painter not only makes decisions concerning what paints and brushes he will use, he needs to know how he will set up his work outdoors and how he will clean up afterwards.

For my early plein air paintings, I chose scenes around my yard. This one is an evening look towards the west and the effects of the setting sun upon my wife’s garden, the garages, the lilies and the maples. In particular, I really liked the way that the evening sun made the “ditch” lilies glow in orange as they were framed against the shadows of the garage. I also like the brilliant glow of the sun upon the yards and how the sun created halos of light around the shadowed trees.

Since this is an early painting of mine, it still shows some of the effects of my drawing style. The trees still have the kind of sketch marks that I’d use with pencils or ink as does the shadowy backs of the garage. As my style loosened up, I learned to depend more upon color rather than sketch marks to define a shape.

This painting really places me in my yard, looking at my neighbors’ yards, the spaces are well defined and the contrasts between light and dark really pull me back into that time. To me, this picture really defines a suburban life that has become more urban than suburban. Time marches on and the living spaces that used to frame the edges of our cities are now only small blocks of peace within a greater urban framework.

Is this the portrait of Bianca Sforza and was it sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci?

Although these pursuits can be seen as distractions from his painting, they were much too inventive and visionary to be brushed off as distractions. In fact, his scientific pursuits lead him to develop a rather scientific style of painting as he explored not only new techniques for painting but also anatomy, as he drew dissected bodies, the science of optics, which lead him to under stand the some of the basics of light. All of this scientific study allowed him to combine both his analytic and his artistic skills to create artwork that was both beautiful and well observed.

The television show spotlighted a collector who had purchased a small painting for $20,000 through a dealer. As he became convinced that it was much older than the 19yh century claim that Christie’s had made, he sought out experts to help him validate his conviction that it was a Da Vinci. Carbon dating, which measured the amount of the carbon-14 isotope radiating from the vellum, dated the cloth to the time of the Renaissance. One artist demonstrated how forgers removed paint from authentically aged canvas to repaint it in the style of a famous artist. In his demonstration, he managed to create a fake Monet with forty hours invested in the fakery. Another artist demonstrated the difficulty that an artist would have doing a ground chalk sketch on vellum. By the angle of the sketching, it was also established that the artist was left handed, a drawing pattern that I can personally identify with.

The end of the show manged, by pure luck, to show how the original painting had been removed from a 15th century book. The book was a history of the Sforza family, the ruling power brokers in Milan in the late 1400s. The Sforzas were known to be major patrons of Da Vinci. At that time, he was caught up in the eternal city wars that plagued northern Italy and designed weaponry for Ludovico Sforza. At about that time that Da Vinci was living in Milan, Ludovico had a young niece who married but died recently afterwards. It was guessed that the book was a wedding present with her sketch placed prominently in the front of the book and it would have been convenient for Leonardo to sketch her prior to the wedding.

If you get a chance to see the show, please do so. It is a fascinating window into how science can currently validate artwork and to what lengths people will go to fake artwork. It is an important lesson to know of you collect the work of old masters.

The Farm Of Seymour Sloan by Junius Sloan, courtesy of the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University

LIFE OF AN ITINERANT PAINTER/Junius Sloan

In the 19th century, the cities of the American Northeast were filled with artists. Some of them led successful careers; others struggled. Some of the ones who struggled left for other areas, the coastal South, western Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Some of them become known as itinerants, or traveling, painters. In the first half of the century, portraiture was the basic cash cow of American art and that is how traveling artists used their skills as they wandered the countryside. But just before the Civil War, landscape painting, inspired by the Hudson River artists, became a hot artistic commodity. Junius Sloan’s career falls between these two styles.

Junius was born in Ohio but his family moved to western Illinois, in 1853, following the growth of the railroads as they spread into the Midwest. In his youth, Junius seems to have developed a knack for art and sketched portraits of the family and neighbors. Completely self taught, Sloan spent his young adulthood traveling through rural New York, painting portraits for a few dollars, here and there, before heading out to Illinois to help his family establish their farm.

Afterwards, he temporarily settled in nearby Princeton, Illinois, before heading back out to paint, this time, back in Ohio. The family had maintained ties there and as he sought portrait work in the region of his boyhood, he made some discoveries. One was that he was smitten by the magic of the Hudson River School and that a market existed for landscape paintings. His other discovery was his love for his neighbor’s daughter, Sara Spencer, who became his wife. Sara’s father not only farmed, he taught penmanship. In their spare time, the Spencers promoted a form of penmanship that would be known as the Spencer script and would be as ubiquitous in the late 19th century as the Palmer Method would in the 20th century, now best known through the Coca-Cola logo. Through his struggles as an itinerant landscape painter, Junius would find that his wife’s classes in penmanship would keep the financial wolf away from the door, as he continually attempted to sell his work and services.

Junius spent some of his itinerant life painting areas near his father’s farm in western Illinois and back in his childhood stomping grounds in Ohio, but it was the lure of the Hudson River valley and the well trod paths of the Hudson River artists where he painted many of his landscapes. Over and over, he pulled his family back to New York and up into the Adirondacks, but from the view of history, those lovely paintings are just the artwork of another Hudson River artist. What makes Sloan special is the paintings he did around the family farm in Kewanee, Illinois. Here, in a number of watercolor and oil paintings, he captured the very early struggle of America as it blazed its path though the Midwest. In particular, he paints his father’s farm, buried behind a grove of trees and a cabin placed up against the corn. There is even cattle in the field. In front, clusters of prairie flowers and above it all, the big Illinois sky.

By the 1860’s, Julius and Sara had settled in Chicago. He still traveled and painted, primarily in New York. By then, it wasn’t just the Hudson River landscape calling but the minor successes in sales that he could claim in the City of New York. He also traveled the Midwest, including Wisconsin, in both Milwaukee and out in the Wisconsin Dells. Everywhere he traveled, he painted. By the end of the century, his parents had sold their property and moved to Redlands, California, now on the outskirts of LA. Julius was visiting there to paint when he fell off a ladder and died.

The first painters to portray any area are usually itinerant. Some are not as gifted as Sloan, but as an itinerant, he can be regarded as Illinois’ first major artist.