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John Brown's grave and other Civil War themes in William T. Richards's Adirondack landscapes

Magazine Antiques, July, 2002 by Linda S. Ferber

No eyewitness pictorial record is known of the execution of John Brown (1800-1859) for treason on December 2, 1859, at Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). In October the radical abolitionist had led a raid on the United States Arsenal at nearby Harpers Ferry in order to arm a slave insurrection. Brown was buried according to his wishes on his farm at North Elba in Essex County, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. (1) Newspaper coverage of his final exploits was extensive. A national audience followed the sensational saga from his raid to his capture, trial, the hanging, and the somber progress of the body north to the family homestead near Lake Placid.

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Brown's last prophecy of a bloody conflict over the question of slavery was quickly realized. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860, the secession of southern states commenced. In April 1861 the war opened with the hostilities at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and President Lincoln set about raising an army to defend the Union. These alarming national events refocused attention on Brown. His gravesite became a martyr's shrine, and by 1861 the lyric envisioning his body "a' mouldering in the grave" had become part of a popular marching song for Union soldiers. (2)

These still-recent events provided the context for a painting by William Trost Richards that at first seems completely anomalous in the context of what we know of the young Philadelphia artist's early career as a landscape specialist (Pl. I). (3) However, further investigation reveals that, in fact, John Brown's Grave (Sketch) of 1863 or early 1864 represents a remarkable fusion of style, subject, and regional site. Moreover, this fascinating little painting was not the artist's only response to the national conflict. On the home front, Richards had already recorded military enlistment in a painting that has been recently rediscovered--Recruiting Station (Bethlehem) of 1861 or early 1862 (Pl. III). A portrait of the Union's commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln, long but inconclusively attributed to Richards, is briefly considered as a coda to this article (Fig. 1).

This is a fascinating trio of works, each a distinct type. One enshrines the Union's most potent symbol--the stars and stripes--while the other two celebrate key figures in the conflict--the Union's leader and a martyr to the cause. All three paintings were created in response to the culture of politics and war--a response we will also discover encoded in other subjects, many of them depictions of the Adirondacks.

Richards's encounters with the Adirondack Mountains came at critical moments in his career and in the life of the nation. The rugged terrain, already a sketching ground for American landscape artists, provided a laboratory in which Richards worked out various landscape agendas over more than a decade. The mountains were objects of veneration whose significance could be heightened by association with aspects of America's political and cultural mood. Richards's approaches ranged from an early mastery of Hudson River school techniques in the 1850s to experimentation in the 1860s with the extreme realism of the short-lived American Pre-Raphaelite movement.

His first Adirondack campaign of 1855 occurred at the high watermark of the Hudson River school's mission to define a national landscape. The resulting Adirondack paintings effectively launched Richards's career. Autumn in the Adirondacks (Pl. IV) of 1857 or 1858--a chromatic tour de force--deftly combined the national attributes of a remote and heavily forested wilderness with an American autumn. By contrast, In the Adirondacks (Pl. V) of 1857 is an idealized view of Elizabethtown in Pleasant Valley that celebrated another national icon: a wilderness domesticated by the presence of mills, homesteads, cultivated fields, and cattle. Nevertheless, sectional tensions and political strife were changing attitudes toward landscape and signaled the beginning of the Hudson River school's decline--a trend accelerated by the Civil War and its aftermath. (4)

During and after the hostilities Richards made regular summer expeditions from his studio in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia) to the Adirondacks, with Elizabethtown his seat of operations. These Adirondack campaigns of 1862 to 1868 occurred in a new context. The optimism epitomized in highly synthetic but convincing images like Autumn in the Adirondacks and In the Adirondacks gave way to the search for a landscape of personal and national reconciliation.

Richards treated war-related themes overtly on only a few occasions, most directly in Recruiting Station (Bethlehem) and John Brown's Grave (Sketch). Nevertheless his responses to the war were also encoded in his remarkable Pre-Raphaelite style landscapes--dense allegories of horticultural and agricultural symbolism. Their botanical protagonists enacted a series of narratives inspired by the parable of the sower from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, a biblical source used by the English Pre-Raphaelites. Paintings with titles like And Some Fell Among Thorns (Fig. 2) and Neglected Corner of a Wheatfield (Pl. VI) may be read as moral allegories of the contrast between good and poor husbandry that could not fail to be interpreted as political by an American audience when the Union cause was often symbolized in the popular press by wheat and the Confederate cause by cotton plants. (5)

John Brown's grave and other Civil War themes in William T. Richards's Adirondack landscapes

Magazine Antiques, July, 2002 by Linda S. Ferber

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