‘Deacon Peckham’s Hobby Horse’ and the curator’s 30-year ride

Catch sight of “Deacon Peckham’s ‘Hobby Horse’ ” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and suddenly, almost without volition, you are eye to eye with the painting that inspired it. The portrait of the brother and sister, “The Hobby Horse,” with its intricately detailed riding toy, is the centerpiece of the nine-portrait exhibit so visually compelling, it feels like it has invisible conveyor belts to draw viewers in.

Awash in vibrant colors and sustained attention to interior spaces, the contemplative images of these 19th-century children are so obviously of a type, it is remarkable that they’ve never been grouped together. But like many aspects of the art world, the back story belies the obvious. A gallery exhibit is often the culmination of a research, restoration and cataloguing process that can take long stretches of time to piece together.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

(Courtesy Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York) - Attributed to Robert Peckham. ‘The Farwell Children,’ c.1841 oil on canvas

(Courtesy Jennifer and Tom Eddy) - Robert Peckham. ‘Webster Tucker,’ c. 1844 oil on canvas

“The Hobby Horse” took 30 years.

Donated to the National Gallery of Art in 1955 by Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, who collected 18th- and 19th-century works by artists who were largely self-taught, “The Hobby Horse,” like many pieces in the folk art collection was unsigned. It was displayed for years as “American 19th Century,” and became a beloved and widely reproduced image.

In 1980, the gallery began to produce a systematic catalogue of its collection. Exhibit curator Deborah Chotner, who had arrived that year, said that, from the beginning, the Peckham piece felt special. Over and over, she stared into the children’s unerring gaze — sometimes the actual portrait, sometimes a reproduction on her desk — and thought, “It looks like they are thinking, like they are evolving.”

She turned to experts in costuming and transportation, and historical societies to piece together clues — geographic location, approximate time frame — about the folk art collection. Small details like the children’s sleeves, the styles of which were ever changing, and the small split in the boy’s tunic helped date “The Hobby Horse” to around 1840.

Initially, Chotner thought they’d make the identification through the portrait’s most striking feature: the horse. The hours it must have taken a craftsman to make the hand-carved horse, covered with hide and a horse hair mane and tail, provided a clue to the family’s economics. A consult with the Library of Congress helped determine the newspaper typeface in the painting was from Boston’s Daily Evening Transcript and Chotner discovered that mid-19th-century New England was swelling with the ranks of the newly moneyed from small manufacturing and chairmaking. She had an approximate time and place but further certainties proved elusive. She continued to catalogue other paintings, returning to gaze, from time to time, at the anonymous children who stared right back. She continued to gather data.

In her research, Chotner noted a 1979 article in the American Art Journal by Dale Johnson, a researcher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Johnson compared other unsigned portraits of brightly adorned children with transfixing gazes with one in the Metropolitan Museum collection and “The Hobby Horse,” and speculated they’d all been done by Robert Peckham.