Walters Art Museum exhibits Baltimore artist Woodville
(Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art/ ) - ‘War News from Mexico,’ Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 oil on canvas, addresses and intertwines several controversies of the day.
Richard Caton Woodville, the most eminent artist to emerge from 19th-century Baltimore, died in London of a morphine overdose in 1855. He was just 30 years old and left behind only a few dozen works, of which 16 paintings are still known to exist, all of which appear in “New Eyes on America: The Genius of Richard Caton Woodville,” the Walters Art Museum’s comprehensive new survey of his life, his Baltimore origins and his work.
Why he took an overdose of morphine, whether accidentally, intentionally or through habit of dissipation, is unknown. “It is almost as if the record was expunged,” says Joy Peterson Heyrman, who curated this fascinating exhibition. Woodville came from a prosperous and well-connected Baltimore family, and he scandalized them at least thrice: By becoming an artist rather than a doctor or businessman; by marrying against their wishes; and by divorcing and remarrying again, the second time to an artist he met in Dusseldorf, Germany. The odds are good that his opium overdose, and the lack of letters or journals that might give us insight into his state of mind, is related to something dark in his life.
(The Wallters Art Museum) - Art Museum, Baltimore, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Versen, 1989 (37.2644)
Not a trace of that is readily apparent in the art he left behind. Woodville’s short career began as an amateur in Baltimore, sketching people he knew and painting a portrait of one of Baltimore’s wealthy and sophisticated art collectors and patrons. An early genre scene, of two men smoking in a bar, was crudely done — lumpy hands and almost cartoonlike faces — but suggested enough skill to appeal to a New York collector. The $75 Woodville earned from this small 1845 work, derivative of Dutch painting, persuaded his family to allow him to pursue art as a career.
Dusseldorf, then a vibrant international center for the arts, beckoned. There he fell in with more skilled and sophisticated painters and the evidence from this exhibition suggests he was an absorptive talent, rapidly improved his technique and was developing into a substantial painter by the time of his death, a decade later. The most evocative of Woodville’s paintings are a series of American scenes, produced in Europe but with the American market in mind, the most famous of which is “War News From Mexico,” now in the Crystal Bridges collection in Arkansas.
These American works capture the visual specificity and tumultuous conflict of the early American republic with uncanny concision. Woodville was working within the confines of genre painting, the depiction of ordinary life (often with upper-class condescension for the lower orders) best known from Dutch painters of the 17th century. But he was importing into genre scenes vivid historical details that gave his subjects far greater resonance than the usual themes familiar from his Dutch predecessors: sentimental family gatherings, drunken peasants or mildly racy liaisons in shadowy parlors.
“War News From Mexico” refers explicitly to the U.S. war of territorial aggression that led to American control over Mexican land in Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Utah. On the shabby front porch of the generically named “American Hotel,” a cluster of men from different generations, classes and races, listen as a centrally placed figure reads the latest newspaper dispatch. The ambiguity and variety of their reactions, as well as the prominent placement of an African American man and ragged black child in the right foreground, all point to the raging controversy over the Mexican war and the role it played in adding slave states to the Union, thus exacerbating the brewing tensions over the definition of American freedom and purpose.
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