John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

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.

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Despite the economic downturn triggered by the financial panic of 1893, the tone of the Chicago fair was one of celebration. It bore a strong resemblance to the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1889, and in many quarters was considered the United States' answer to that spectacular event staged by one of Europe's most advanced countries. Although the Paris exposition featured some adventurous structures such as the Eiffel Tower, planners of the Chicago fair decided to avoid innovative architecture. They were aware of French critics who cast aspersions on the Eiffel Tower as overly influenced by raw, unaesthetic American technology. (6)

The Orcutt chromolithograph after Key's painting Court of Honor, Peristyle and Agricultural Building from Machinery Hall (Pl. III) depicts the architectural high point of the Chicago exposition--the Court of Honor (a translation of the Cour d'Honneur at the Paris exposition). Its Grand Basin ended in the Peristyle, or colonnade, in the center distance bordering Lake Michigan. On the left is George B. Post's massive Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, and on the right, with its western facade facing the viewer, is McKim, Mead and White's Agricultural Building. On the far side of the bridge in the foreground, nicknamed "Farmer's Bridge" because of its proximity to the Agricultural Building, the Neptune Column bisects the composition, and in the distance Daniel Chester French's golden statue of the Republic with her upraised arms contributes to the impression that ancient Rome has been reincarnated on the banks of Lake Michigan. The only reminder that this fantasy city is located in the western United States is the buffalo statuary on pedestals flanking the bridge.

A third Orcutt chromolithograph is based on Key's painting Liberal Arts, Electricity and Administration Buildings from Corridor of Woman's Building (Pl. IV). Unlike the other two chromolithographs showing the fair in broad daylight, this scene is bathed in the delicate light of sunset that spreads warm harmonies throughout the composition. The imperial architecture so dramatically captured in Court of Honor (Pl. III) is relegated to the distance, where it becomes a backdrop for a scene depicting visitors strolling through the fair or taking boat rides on the lagoon.

Key's involvement with the World's Columbian Exposition did not end when the gates were closed for the last time on October 30, 1893. His name appears on the title page of a book of photographs depicting the fair published by W. B. Conkey Company of Chicago in 1894 entitled on the cover A City of Palaces, and on the title page Picturesque World's Fair.

Sometime during the 1890s Key formulated an ambitious plan to paint ten huge views of the Chicago fair, each measuring ten by twenty feet, to be shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In February 1898 he held an exhibition in his Chicago studio of the four paintings he had completed. In their reviews, the Chicago critics praised the paintings for bringing back to life the experience of the fair. The Daily Inter Ocean noted that they were "far above average of works of this sort and have considerable artistic merit." (7)

Apparently Key had undertaken this project on a freelance basis, but the huge paintings soon found a home. The State of Illinois secured them for exhibition in a specially built annex next to the Illinois Building at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, which opened in Omaha on June 1, 1898. If Key's original plan had been to impress Parisians with the glories of the Chicago fair, it found partial fulfillment at the Omaha exposition. These paintings disappeared after the close of the fair and have not been located. (8) The six other paintings in the projected series were never executed.

Although preceded by lesser fairs in San Francisco and Saint Louis, the Omaha exposition was the next major world's fair to be held after the World's Columbian Exposition. The idea behind it was to celebrate the progress of commerce and culture in the states west of the Mississippi River. After some discussion, the planners decided to follow the Chicago model with all the major buildings designed in the beaux arts style, but they stipulated that the architects be from western states. Another distinctive feature in Omaha was to connect the buildings with colonnades. Otherwise the Omaha fair was a smaller version of the Chicago exposition, with imposing buildings surrounded by lawns and waterways. A midway, similar to Chicago's, was the site of beer halls, restaurants, and ethnic exhibits. A giant seesaw took the place of the Ferris wheel that had been a symbol of the Chicago fair. (9)

By August Key was in Omaha painting views of the fair. His depiction of the Grand Court, Omaha's version of the Chicago Court of Honor, was presented to President William McKinley (1843-1901) by the fair's manager, Edward Rosewater (1841-1906). A similar work by Key that was exhibited at the Whitmore Gallery in downtown Omaha evoked the following encomium from a reporter from the Omaha Evening Bee: "Every detail of the architecture, the decorations and landscapes is perfectly reproduced and the crowd seems almost alive, so accurately has the artist caught the inspiration of the moving panorama." (10) Key's Trans-Mississippi View--Daylight (Durham Western Heritage Museum, Omaha) demonstrates these qualities. It depicts the United States Government Building on the western side of the court, its pediment surmounted by a version of the flamboyant statue Liberty Enlightening the World.

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By August 1898 Key had contracted with the Taber Prang Art Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, to provide paintings of the Omaha fair that would be made into chromolithographs. Six were eventually published, one of which portrays a campground of tepees from the Indian Congress (Pl. V), (11) a mingling of various western tribes brought to Omaha with the assistance of a forty thousand dollar government grant. James Mooney (1861-1921), an ethnologist, was appointed director of the congress, and the hope was that the Indians would display many traditional customs and crafts that were rapidly being lost in the modern world. Mooney became frustrated when promoters paid the Indians to stage reenactments of battles for the entertainment of the fairgoers.

By December 1898 Key had made quite an impression in Omaha, and an exhibition of his Trans-Mississippi paintings was held in the building of the Omaha Evening Bee. (12) At this time business interests in Omaha formed a company to create a second Omaha fair in 1899 using the existing buildings. The Greater America Exposition, as this fair was called, named Key as art director in charge of assembling a collection of important American and European paintings in the Fine Arts Building. The Greater America Exposition could not repeat the success of the Trans-Mississippi. It was bedeviled by financial problems and low attendance from the beginning, and Key had difficulty providing an interesting art display. By September the art exhibition had attained "a satisfactory state of artistic completion," in the words of a reporter from the Omaha World-Herald, and Key could be seen painting "large pictures of the World's Fair ... quite undisturbed by the throng of visitors attracted by 'a real working exhibit.'" (13)

Key's paintings of the Greater America Exposition have all disappeared, but a remarkable collection of his works depicting the next American world's fair, the Pan-American Exposition, held in Buffalo in 1901, has survived in the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. Taking its cue from the Greater America Exposition, the Pan-American Exposition was conceived as a celebration of the contributions made to civilization by the relatively new cultures of the Western hemisphere. The city of Buffalo was emerging as an important commercial center whose economic prosperity was being fostered by its position as a transportation hub on the shore of Lake Erie and its proximity to the abundant hydroelectric power that had recently been developed at Niagara Falls.

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Organizers of the Buffalo fair sought to distinguish it from the previous expositions by creating buildings inspired by the Spanish renaissance, both because so many Western hemisphere cultures had Hispanic roots and because the architecture itself had a festive playfulness, appropriate to a world's fair. Appointed director of color, the New York artist Charles Yardley Turner (1850-1918) imposed an allegorical color scheme on the buildings. Bright red buildings, emblematic of primitive man, housed the artifacts of early man, while neighboring buildings, each one in a more subtle color than its predecessor, dramatized the transition to high civilization. The resulting ensemble was christened the Rainbow City. (14)

Sometime in 1901 Key arrived on the scene, apparently working as a freelancer, and embarked on an ambitious series of paintings depicting the fair. By October fifteen of them had been completed and were exhibited in the rotunda of the Buffalo Public Library (now the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library), where they received an enthusiastic endorsement from the Buffalo Morning Express. After noting that the artist had made his reputation as a painter of the Chicago and Omaha expositions, the writer took note of "the immense scope of the subject and the difficulties it presented," and praised the artist for his "painstaking" effort in producing paintings that give "a vivid idea of the exposition." (15) Early in 1902 the Buffalo Historical Society (now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society) purchased these paintings. They resemble Key's depictions of the other fairs, with visitors portrayed in animated foregrounds setting off middle grounds of splendid buildings in a high-keyed palette that captures the energy and optimism of the event. A typical example is Machinery and Transportation Building (Pl. VI), which shows this major attraction with its Spanish mission facade and towers. In the foreground is the Court of Fountains, and at the far left is the Temple of Music in an Italian renaissance design embellished with Moorish flourishes. The Temple of Music was the building in which President McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz (1873-1901) on September 6, 1901, but no hint of this tragedy can be found in Key's colorful rendition.

Another large painting from the Buffalo series draws on Key's ability to capture reflections in water. Delaware Park Lake with Casino (Pl. VIII) shows an expanse of still water in the foreground giving way to the casino with its orange tile roof in the middle ground and the formidable Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), veiled by a mist of atmospheric perspective, in the distance. Warm harmonies of orange and green permeate the scene and give it a poetic quality that no photograph could project. A third work depicting the Midway (Pl. VII) captures the light-hearted architecture of the less pretentious section of the fair with its circus atmosphere that includes a parade of camels and costumed dervishes mingling with the sturdy middle-class American fairgoers. The building with the sphinx and obelisks in the center housed Akoun's Beautiful Orient with its bazaar offering wares from the Middle East. The strange structure in the shape of a human face at the left housed Dreamland, where visitors were asked to negotiate a maze of mirrors.

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The last world's fair Key recorded on canvas was the spectacular Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in Saint Louis from May to November 1904. Unlike his freelance status at Chicago and Buffalo, Key seems to have been connected to this exposition's management, at least unofficially, and he seems also to have arranged to have a local newspaper, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, commission several works that were reproduced in its Sunday supplements, beginning in May. Key must have arrived in Saint Louis long before the opening of the show because by February 1904 he had already completed seventeen paintings of the fair, which he carried to Washington, D.C., in an effort to persuade Congress to loan the fair's management $4 million. (16)

The Saint Louis fair was created to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Its ambitious directors succeeded in constructing an exposition that was bigger and more impressive than its predecessors. The mixture of conservative architectural styles contributed to the theme of international peace and cooperation. Positioned on a hilltop at the end of a body of water called the Grand Basin, the fair's central building, Festival Hall, resembled the top half of the Capitol in Washington with its two-hundred-foot-high dome. A major landmark of the show was the Louisiana Purchase Monument, a hundred-foot-high column surmounted with an allegorical figure of Peace carrying a torch to the nations of the world. (17)

On May 1, 1904, the magazine section of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat ran a large illustration "after a painting by John R. Key" entitled The Exposition on Opening Day. This was a view of Festival Hall from the Louisiana Purchase Monument, with the walkways crowded with fairgoers. (18) This illustration portrayed a scene almost identical to Key's large painting Looking South towards Festival Hall (Pl. IX), which the exposition company purchased from the artist. It shows the architectural center of the fair on an almost cloudless day, allowing Key to demonstrate the contrast between the ivory-colored buildings, a powder blue sky, and its reflection in the basin. The parade of elephants and camels, gondolas in the lagoon, pennants and flags--embellishments also found in Key's other paintings of fairs--give a sense of exuberance to a scene dominated by classical architecture.

On July 31 the St. Louis Globe-Democrat announced that a series of color reproductions of Key's world's fair paintings would be distributed free with every Sunday edition. These views, the announcement proclaimed, would "far surpass any other World's Fair views which have been or will be issued." (19) The original oil painting for the color print distributed in the August 21 issue has survived, Festival Hall and the Grand Basin (Pl. X). Promoting this print, the newspaper resorted to hyperbole:

It's hard to "paint the lily," but the genius of Mr. Key has
accomplished wonders, and his painting is one which will be admired and
cherished as a fitting memento of the fairy-like spot and a highly
prized souvenir of the greatest World's Fair in all history. (20)

Key's portrayals of the Chicago, Omaha, Buffalo, and Saint Louis expositions are the most effective, and sometimes the only, color images of these events. The fairs were among the last affirmations of the idea of inevitable human progress caused by the emergence of science and technology working in concert with the liberal arts in a democratic political system. Two world wars, a depression, and a cold war that threatened global annihilation ushered in a darker vision of human potentiality. The modern movement in art drove Key's paintings into the basements of historical societies and the attics of private houses. In the last several decades, a growing reevaluation has brought neglected American art back to visibility. Key's gondolas (see Pl. XI) may have led the artist to think of himself as a latter-day Canaletto (1697-1768). And perhaps the best of his paintings, like those of the great eighteenth-century scene painter, will pass the test of time.

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1 The major biographical source about Key is Alfred C. Harrison Jr., "John Ross Key, American Painter" (unpublished monograph. North Point Gallery Archive, San Francisco).

2 See Alfred C. Harrison Jr., "Bierstadt's Bombardment of Fort Sumter reattributed," The Magazine ANTIOUES, vol. 129, no. 2 (February 1986), pp. 416-422. The painting is now in the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina.

3 Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, April 16, 1890, p. 4.

4 Key was not the only painter in Chicago whose works appeared as chromolithographs. Childe Hassam did a series of paintings of the World's Columbian Exposition that were published as color supplements in the Chicago Times, and other artists such as Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942) and Charles Graham (1852-1911) had color prints made of their paintings. See Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America: Chromolithography, 1840-1900 (David R. Godine, Boston, and Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Forth Worth, Texas, 1979), pp. 201-205, for a discussion of chromolithographs of the World's Columbian Exposition, and also pp. 313, 343.

5 American Paintings from the Collection of Mrs. George Arden, Part I, Christie's, New York, May 22, 1991. Lot 119 (illustrated in color). I am indebted to Lesley Martin of the Chicago Historical Society for information about Key's Chicago chromolithographs.

6 For a comparison of the Paris and Chicago fairs, see Richard Guy Wilson, "Challenge and Response: Americans and the Architecture of the 1889 Exposition" in Annette Blaugrund et al., Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989), pp. 92-110. For a good general history of the World's Columbian Exposition, see Robert W. Rydell, "Rediscovering the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition," in Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World's Fair (National Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 1993), pp. 18-66.

7 Daily Inter Ocean, February 6, 1898, p. 17.

8 For a description of the Illinois Building and annex with Key's paintings, see Omaha Evening Bee, June 21, 1898, p. 1.

9 For photographs of and information about the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, see the "Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition" Web site prepared by the Omaha Public Library, http://www.omaha.lib.ne.us/transmiss. I am grateful to Patrick Esser of the library for information about Key's Omaha paintings.

10 Omaha Evening Bee, August 24, 1898, p. 1.

11 For a photograph by Frank A. Rinehart (1861-1928) of the scene portrayed in the chromolithograph, see "Indian Congress--General View," TMI number 01090, reproduced on the Omaha Public Library Web site (n. 9). For an advertisement promoting the Taber Prang Art Company chromolithographs, see Omaha Evening Bee, October 21, 1898, p. 10.

12 Ibid., December 3, 1898, p. 10.

13 Omaha World-Herald, September 13, 1899, p. 5. For post-mortems on both Omaha fairs, see ibid., October 30, 1899, p. 8, and November 1, 1899, p. 1.

14 For photographs of and information about the Pan-American Exposition, see the Buffalo Free-Net Library Web site, http://bfn.org/~library/local/pan-am.html.

15 Buffalo Morning Express, October 10, 1901, p. 7. I am indebted to Melissa Wertman Brown of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society for this reference and other documents pertaining to Key's Buffalo paintings.

16 This information is contained in "Incidents in the Life of John Ross Key," a typewritten sheet, probably by the artist's widow, Ellenore Dutcher Key (d. 1930). It was found in a collection of documents related to Key that were preserved by her family and is now in the North Point Gallery Archive. In February 1904, David Rowland Francis (1850-1927), the president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, persuaded Congress to loan it $4 million to allow the fair to open on time. I am indebted to Andrew J. Walker, the director of museum collections and conservation at the Missouri Historical Society, Saint Louis, for information concerning this incident and other material relating to Key's Saint Louis paintings.

17 For photographs of and information about the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, see the "World's Fairs and Expositions" Web site, http://www.boondocksnet.com/expos/louisiana.html. See also the "1904 World's Fair" Web site. http://washingtonmo.com/1904/index.htm.

18 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 1, 1904, magazine section, p. 2.

19 Ibid., July 31, 1904, p. 12.

20 Ibid., August 14, 1904, p. 12. Advertisements promoting the prints were published a week in advance.

ALFRED C. HARRISON JR. is president of the North Point Gallery in San Francisco.

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