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Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2000 by Kenneth John Myers
Systematically organized collections of contemporary art, unusual at any time, were especially rare in the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the new nation boasted few art collectors of any kind, even fewer professional painters, and almost no commercial art galleries. One of the first planned collections of contemporary American art was put together in the space of a few months in late 1826 and early 1827 by the Stevens family of Hoboken, New Jersey, which commissioned twelve paintings from seven of the best artists working in the United States. In a letter to his mother of November 1826, the artist Samuel F. B. Morse reported that the collection was to include "historical pictures of Allston, Vanderlyn, Sully, and myself, and landscapes of the principal landscape painters." The completed collection did not contain any paintings by Washington Allston. But it did include historical subjects by Morse, John Vanderlyn, and Thomas Sully and landscapes by three artists whom twentie th-century historians would join Morse in describing as the most important American landscape painters of the day--Thomas Birch, Thomas Doughty, and Thomas Cole. [1]
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The Stevens collection is historically important both because of the unusually deliberate manner in which it was put together and because of the exceptionally public space in which it was exhibited. Colonel John Stevens and his sons owned one of the largest transportation businesses in the United States. Eager to differentiate their steamboats from those operated by commercial rivals, the Stevenses were among the first American businessmen to use the social cachet of art to help sell a product. Completed by early March 1827, all twelve paintings were displayed in James Earle's frame shop in Philadelphia before being forwarded to the Kensington shipyard, where they were installed in the main cabin of the new Hudson River steamboat Albany. [2]
From the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 until the opening of the Hudson River Railroad joining New York with Albany in 1851, Hudson River steamboats carried more passengers more miles than any other single link in the national transportation system. Although there are few reliable statistics documenting the number of steamboat passengers on the Hudson River during this period, nineteenth-century analysts estimated that in the early 1830s steamboats were carrying 185,000 passengers a year between New York and Albany. This was at a time when the combined population of the two cities was approximately 230,000. The Stevenses operated the Albany as a Hudson River day boat until the early 1840s. The paintings remained in the main cabin at least until 1836, when a New York engraver named Thomas Woodcock reported seeing them. The paintings probably remained in place until the winter of 1843-44, at which point the cabins were fitted with sleeping berths so that the Albany could be used as a night boat. Because most Hudson River travelers preferred to see the river by daylight, the fastest and most elegant boats were assigned to day service, while slower or less elegant or older boats were put on the night runs, which took longer and charged reduced rates. The Albany was operated as a night boat in 1844 and 1845, but was then withdrawn from service and sold for scrap. [3]
The Stevens paintings were displayed in the main cabin of the Albany for at least nine years. They probably hung there for at least sixteen years. From 1827 until sometime between 1836 and 1843 or 1845, the Albany paintings were among the most accessible and widely seen works of contemporary American art.
Reconstructing a Dispersed Collection
Contemporary newspaper articles and advertisements carried accounts of the Albany paintings, and several contemporary artists and travelers provided detailed descriptions of them. In the published version of a May 1827 speech titled "Academies of Art," Morse gave full descriptive titles for all twelve of the paintings (Fig. 12). Morse did not mention their size or the support on which they had been painted, but in a letter published in the Crayon in 1857, the painter Asher B. Durand recalled that they had been on wood panels "about four feet in length." The size and support of the paintings is further specified in a manuscript journal by a resident of Philadelphia named Arthur St. Clair Nichols, who traveled on the Albany in July 1827. According to Nichols, the main cabin was decorated with "12 superb paintings, 22 by 46 inches" in size, each of which was on a mahogany panel that had been covered "with three coats of paint as preparation." [4] Because of these unusually detailed descriptions, I have been able to locate seven of the twelve paintings. Each of them is painted on a finely grained panel. The back of each panel has been scarred with numerous deep gouges where screws were used to attach the paintings to the walls of the cabin (Fig. 1). The paintings I have located are Morse's Una and the Dwarf Relating the Capture of the Red Cross Knight to Prince Arthur and His Squire (Fig. 20); Vanderlyn's variation on his early 1812 masterwork Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (Fig. 18); Sully's Mother and Child (Fig. 19); the earliest of Cole's four paintings illustrating a scene from James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans (Fig. 16); a second Cole which was his last major view of Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskill Mountains (Fig. 15); Birch's View of the Bay of New-York, from Castle Garden, Castle William and Staten Island in the Background (Fig. 13); and a second Birch showing the outer reaches of New York Harbor titled View of the Coast near Sandy Hook (Fig. 14).
