Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection

In his manuscript journal, Arthur St. Clalr Nichols described the main cabin as forming "in every respect a princely drawing-room." It was fifty feet long by twenty-four feet wide, with a ceiling seven and a half feet high. Furniture was supplied by the Philadelphia firm of J. A. Stewart and C. M. James, which specialized in the production of seating, including stuffed pieces and "fancy chairs." [33] Nichols described partitions at either end of the main cabin hung with "large mirrors . . . set in crimson and outer gilt frames," outer walls lined with "damask stuffed seats with high damask backs," fore and aft doors of "beautifully polished mahogany," and floors laid with "elegant carpets." In 1828, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper reported that the cabinet pieces were made of "marble, mahogany, [and] the beautiful bird's-eye maple of the country." Nichols specifically mentioned that the paintings "decorated the sides [of the cabin,] with intervening windows." [34]

Durand's letter in the Crayon and Thomas S. Cummings's Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design both report that the paintings were commissioned by Colonel Stevens. This is unlikely. In 1826, Colonel Stevens was seventy-seven years old and the family steamboat businesses were being run by three of his sons. Family correspondence shows that Robert Livingston Stevens (1787-1856) designed the boats and ran the boiler works in which their engines were produced, Edwin Augustus Stevens (1795-1868) took care of finances, and James Alexander Stevens (1790-1873) supervised day-to-day operations. Scattered references in the Vanderlyn and Cole papers confirm that it was James Alexander Stevens who commissioned the paintings and arranged their delivery to Philadelphia. [35]

The commissions for the paintings were awarded before Morse wrote his mother on November 9, 1826. In his journals, Sully notes that he began work on Mother and Child in early December, added figures to Lawrence's copy of Washington's Passage of the Delaware in mid-January, and completed Mother and Child by early February. Cole's Scene from "Last of the Mohicans" is inscribed "1826," and was probably completed in December. Cole almost certainly completed his Landscape View near the Falls of the Kauterskill by late February 1827, when he visited Philadelphia and met with Sully in his studio. Morse completed Una and the Dwarf by March 2, when the New York Evening Post reported that it was "just finished." Vanderlyn's Ariadne was delivered to James Stevens in Philadelphia by the middle of March. [36]

The Stevenses paid well. At the time of the commissions, Sully was the most financially successful of these painters. He was paid two hundred dollars each for the Mother and Child and a preliminary study in oil. In January 1828, an unidentified buyer paid Morse one hundred and fifty dollars for a copy of Una and the Dwarf Stevens probably paid more for the first version. In his 1857 letter to the Crayon, Durand somewhat hesitantly recalled that the price per painting had been one hundred and fifty dollars. That would have been an attractively high price for Cole and most of the other artists involved. In his account of the Albany, Arthur St. Clair Nichols reported that the entire boat cost $65,000, that furnishings for the cabins cost $10,000, and that the painting collection was valued at $4,000. [37]