Paintings of Florida in the Vickers collection

Patiently and persistently, they have built a remarkable collection that fittingly hangs in their house overlooking the majestic Saint Johns River, which had an attraction for artists in Florida comparable to that of the Hudson River in New York. Like the Hudson, the Saint Johns River passes some of the most beautiful places in the state.

Artists did not come to Florida in any numbers until later in its history as a state, and they did not come primarily to paint, as they had earlier to the Catskill Mountains in New York, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, or, after the Civil War, to the western frontier. They came to Florida for their health (George Inness and William Morris Hunt) or for recreation (Winslow Homer). Largely for that reason - as the Vickerses candidly admit - a significant collection of art devoted to Florida could not be shaped solely by considerations of quality or the artists' reputations. In addition to Inness, Homer, Hunt, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Moran, and William Glackens, Florida was visited more often by lesser-known artists. And visited is the operative word, with the major exception of Heade, who came to Saint Augustine in 1883 and died there in 1904, by then the leader of a small art colony. That said, the Vickers collection is wonderfully rich, remarkably deep, and filled with the most delightful and enlightening surprises.

The earliest work in the collection is a watercolor of 1829 by the thirteen-year-old George Washington Sully(1) of a house in Magnolia, painted about the time the town was settled (Pl. IV). One of the latest works is Florida Swamp (Pl. XI) by Glackens. It was once believed to have been painted in 1898, while Glackens was in Florida covering the Spanish-American War as an illustrator for McClure's magazine. However, its fluently impressionistic style is incompatible with his work of that period, and as Henry Adams has proposed,(2) it was most probably painted in 1932 when Glackens visited his artist friend Ernest Lawson (1873-1939)(3) in Coral Gables. This is Glackens's only known painting of Florida, and on the basis of its restrained, subtle color and its masterful brushwork, one can only regret that he did not paint more.

Sully's and Glackens's paintings bracket many others that share similar subjects. A number of them, like Sully's, depict the settlement of Florida and aspects of life there. The Hudson River school painter John Bunyan Bristol, for example, visited Florida in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, and his depiction of the life led by the blacks (Pl. III) cannot be an entirely innocent account of the issue that soon divided the nation.

The view shown in Plate XIII may depict Brock House, the famous hotel built by Jacob Brock in the small town of Enterprise. The hotel was reached by steamer along the Saint Johns River, and after the Civil War it was the destination of such illustrious visitors as President Ulysses S. Grant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Winslow Homer. The latter came to Enterprise several times beginning in 1886, calling it "the most beautiful place in Florida."(4)

The painting in Plate II shows the twin towers of the Ponce de Leon, a hotel in Saint Augustine designed by the prominent architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings and opened in 1888. It was the first of a chain of grand hotels built by Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913) along the east coast of Florida. They were served by the Florida East Coast Railway, which Flagler also built, diverting tourists from such places as Enterprise to the coastal resorts that stretched from Saint Augustine to Key West. A painting of 1908 by William Aiken Walker entitled Lower Matecumbe Key (also in the Vickers collection) shows Flagler's railroad works. His railway reached Key West in 1912 but was abandoned after a hurricane destroyed many miles of it in 1935.

Walkers Ocklawaha River (Pl. XIV) and Ocklawaha Steamer (Pl. XV) of 1888 are, like the paired and series paintings of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), narratives of profound historical change - in this case of the steamboat as it invades and forever destroys the primeval quiet of the Florida wilderness.

Florida history is represented retrospectively rather than prospectively in Louis Comfort Tiffany's painting of Saint Augustine (Pl. VIII), which depicts the Castillo de San Marcos (now Fort Marion), begun in 1672. It is the oldest masonry fort in the United States and the most permanent symbol of the antiquity of settlement in Florida.

One of Florida's greatest historical figures, Osceola, the leader of the Seminole Indians during the Second Seminole War in 1835, is the subject of the portrait in Plate VI, which is a copy of an original life portrait by George Catlin.(5) Catlin drew the "very celebrated warrior"(6) in 1838 while Osceola was imprisoned at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he died later that year. That drawing also served as the basis for the one shown on the contents page of this issue, which is from the souvenir album Catlin made for the duke of Portland (probably the fifth duke, William John Cavendish Bentinck-Scott [1800-1879]).