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John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.

Starting in 1893 with the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America, world's fairs were held in various American cities every few years and became popular showcases for the state of culture in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. These fairs included the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition held in Omaha in 1898, the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904. While each was created to commemorate different aspects of the American experience, they were similar in many ways. All of them celebrated progress--especially the advances in material prosperity and technology that had occurred in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The dawning of the age of electricity and the invention of such revolutionary products as the telephone and the automobile held out the promise that mankind was on the verge of triumphing over the forces of nature.

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Curiously, the exhibits that displayed the latest miracles of science and industry were housed in buildings whose conservative architecture was firmly rooted in the beaux arts tradition. The exposition planners wanted to demonstrate that the United States was no vulgar, upstart culture, but a civilization conversant with the greatest achievements of the past. Also, the imposing grandeur of classical architecture, especially buildings based on prototypes from imperial Rome, suited the nationalist temper of the times.

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On the other hand, each of these fairs featured a midway removed from the center of the fair, where beer halls and popular entertainments were offered in a carnival atmosphere. The fairs' promoters needed a wider box-office appeal than purely educational exhibits. The contradictions in American life were fully evident in these fairs, including the way in which admiration for primitive cultures coexisted with a strong undertone of white supremacy.

Extensive photographic records have survived that preserve the appearance of these fairs. But color photography was in its infancy, and the painter was still the best source for color renditions of the fairs. Furthermore, artists went beyond literal transcriptions to give their paintings an interpretative feeling beyond the scope of photographs.

One artist made a specialty of recording these fairs in suites of paintings that bring them vividly to life. John Ross Key, a landscape painter in his early career, had settled in Chicago during the 1880s and set up shop as an interior designer; while occasionally exhibiting paintings in Chicago galleries. (1) Key had made his debut as an artist after the Civil War by exhibiting views of Fort Sumter under bombardment (2) and had developed a solid reputation in Baltimore, San Francisco, and Boston for his quiet landscapes in the American luminist mode. His greatest honor as a landscape painter came in 1876 when his painting The Golden Gate (unlocated) was one of twelve American works to be awarded a prize by an international jury at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. But Key was never able to make a satisfactory living from his paintings, which led to his secondary career as a decorator.

In 1890 Key held an exhibition of his works in his Chicago studio, which one critic patronized by calling them "pleasing" despite having been painted "in the style which was popular twenty or thirty years ago." (3) By 1893 Key had receded from visibility as an exhibiting artist in Chicago, and he either did not submit his paintings for inclusion in the American section of the Fine Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, or they were rejected. Instead he contracted with the Orcutt Company of Chicago and the Werner Company of Akron to provide paintings of the exposition that would be reproduced as chromolithographs. Key's works had already been published as chromolithographs by the New York City firm of H. Wood and Company in 1869 and by L. Prang and Company of Boston in the early 1870s. (4)

All of Key's original paintings of the World's Columbian Exposition have disappeared, although a gouache identical to the Orcutt chromolithograph shown in Plate II surfaced on the art market in recent years. (5) The gouache is executed in a broad, breezy style influenced by the impressionist aesthetic that had made significant inroads in the American art world by 1893. Artists like Childe Hassam (1859-1935) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) had created highly regarded paintings depicting prosperous Americans promenading down boulevards or relaxing in parks. Paintings of world's fairs that showed visitors with parasols strolling along paths surrounded by beaux arts architecture fitted comfortably in this genre. Perhaps smarting from the 1890 critic's dismissal of his paintings as being "twenty or thirty years out of date," Key modernized his style from the spiritually charged, highly detailed Hudson River school approach of his earlier works to the broadly painted, bright image shown in the chromolithograph. As in other renditions of the Chicago exposition such as John Henry Twachtman's World's Fair (Pl. I), Key's image contrasts the recreational aspect of the fair with its higher purpose, symbolized by the classical architecture.

John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.

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