Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration

October 3, 2021–January 9, 2022

Main Exhibition Galleries, East Building

Art Along the Rivers

A Bicentennial Celebration

The 200th anniversary of Missouri’s statehood provides an opportunity to explore the vibrant creative heritage of the area surrounding St. Louis. Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration brings together over 150 extraordinary works of art produced or collected within the “confluence region,” an elongated area that crosses through present-day Missouri and Illinois. Though small, this region has played an outsized role in the history of North America due to the meeting of powerful rivers, trails, and routes within its borders.

This exhibition acknowledges the inequities and conflicts in the confluence region that empower some artistic voices and silence others. Missouri’s statehood was granted with the deep scars of legalized slavery. This situation imposed inhumane conditions on the creative expression of African Americans. Indigenous peoples, including the Osage, Illini, Missouria, and ancient Mississippians, served as the land’s caretakers for centuries. In1803, the United States claimed political control of the region, enabling white Americans to force the removal of Native American nations in a drive to profit from the land’s natural resources.

Art Along the Rivers amplifies the many complex stories offered by the remarkable works of art it presents. The exhibition comprises an incredible variety of objects produced over 1,000 years. Arranged into five thematic sections, these artworks engage each other and viewers in vibrant and often surprising dialogues that reveal their individual and collective visual power.

Audio guide introduction begins here. Audio guide available at slam.org/audio.

#ArtAlongTheRivers | #STLArtMuseum

This exhibition is organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum. Its presentation is generously supported by the William T. Kemper Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Edward L. Bakewell Jr. Endowment for Special Exhibitions, the Trio Foundation of St. Louis, and the Ken and Nancy Kranzberg Fund.

Norman Akers,
citizen Osage Nation, born 1958

Dripping World, 2020
oil on canvas

Pipes spew oil and industrial waste onto a toxic landscape while enlarged water molecules hang in a sky spanned by a map of Kansas and Oklahoma. Osage Nation peoples were displaced in the early 19th century from their homelands in the confluence region and relocated to a reservation within the map’s area. Anglo-Americans’ feelings of entitlement to the land and its profitable natural resources instigated this forced removal. Norman Akers directly addressed the environmental and personal legacies of this displacement through his use of maps and animals, such as the elk and turtle. These creatures are important to Osage cultural beliefs about creation and the land.

In Dripping World, perceptions of time intermingle with relationships to place. As Akers expressed, “Through layering of visual images that seem to coexist without any clear hierarchical order, I begin to convey a non-linear sense of time. As these images freely mingle between the past and present, they become a metaphor for the experiences I encounter when I am at home in Oklahoma, traveling across ancestral lands in Kansas, participating in the E-lon-schka ceremonies, and just simply living.”

Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, Gift of the Jedel Family Foundation 2021.102

Art at the Confluence

The confluence region witnessed some of North America’s most significant movements of people and materials for over 1,000 years. The continent’s three most powerful rivers—the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio—meet within its boundaries. Indigenous trade routes stretched through the region from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River provided a major north-south artery. The Missouri River and, later, western overland trails made the confluence region the “Gateway to the West” for non-Indigenous commercial, scientific, and military explorers.

St. Louis, founded in 1764, and its surrounding area soon resembled a busy cosmopolitan hub despite its distance from other major colonial settlements. Europeans, Americans, and Native Americans gathered in the city to connect with suppliers, guides, government officials, and traders. Many artists departed from St. Louis on their journeys to provide a visual accounting of western lands and peoples. The development of this hub also led to the removal of Native American groups such as the Osage Nation.

Some communities came to the confluence region to stay. Their artists produced works that are, at times, a stylistic mix derived from the area’s diverse cultures. At other times, these artworks sustained a community’s resilience by maintaining its distinct visual traditions.

from top to bottom:

Seth Eastman,
American, 1808–1875

View 100 Miles Above St. Louis, c.1847–49
watercolor

Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Jane and Warren Shapleigh, Mr. and Mrs. G. Gordon Hertslet, Mr. William Pagenstecher and the Garden Club of St. Louis 101:1970

16 Miles Above the Mouth of the Ohio, c.1847–49
watercolor

Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillian Trust 114:1971

Delicate watercolor washes capture the reflections of trees, shrubbery, and waterfowl in these two evocative scenes. Military captain Seth Eastman had trained at West Point as a topographical artist. He traveled down the Mississippi River in 1846 from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to its confluence with the Ohio River in Cairo, Illinois, capturing scenery along the way. These two views from above and below St. Louis evoke a serene float through a vast, idyllic wilderness.

John James Audubon,
American (born Haiti), 1785–1851

Say’s Squirrel, 1843
watercolor, gouache, pencil, and chalk

Two playful squirrels are carefully illustrated in naturalist John James Audubon’s watercolor. The artist combined scientific detail, such as highlighted textures of fur, whiskers, and clawed feet, with a sense of lively animation. After the success of his book Birds of America, Audubon began working on a companion volume documenting mammals. In 1843, he traveled up the Missouri River from St. Louis in search of specimens to include in his publication. He composed this watercolor of two local squirrels while in St. Louis waiting to begin his exploration.

Rees-Jones Collection, Dallas, TX 2021.40

from top to bottom:

Charles Ferdinand Wimar,
American (born Germany), 1828–1862

Studies of Palaneapape (Struck-by-Ree or Struck-by-Arikara) and a Dog Travois (leaf 21 verso), 1858
graphite

Studies of Arikara Indians and Mandan Earth Lodges, Vicinity of Fort Clark (leaf 6 recto), 1858
graphite

Charles Wimar filled sketchbooks with observations of Native Americans during a six-month trip up the Missouri River from St. Louis to North Dakota in 1858. The bottom sketch depicts an Arikara man standing next to stacks of trade goods. Mandan earth lodges are detailed on the right.

During his travels, Wimar witnessed the Dakota peoples’ sharp opposition to a recent sale of their lands to the United States government. In the top sketch, the artist depicted the Yankton (Dakota) leader Palaneapape wearing a Van Buren peace medal, which he received in 1837 after signing a land treaty with the United States. Given the tensions that existed during the creation of this portrait, Palaneapape’s medal reminds viewers of the government’s repeated, forced renegotiations of legal Indigenous territorial claims.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. M. F. Hahn 61:1941.21v, 60:1941.6

Nicolas Point,
French (active United States), 1799–1868

Altar in a Tipi, c.1841–47
watercolor

A Christian altar with a cross, lit candles, and drapery has been placed within a Native American winter home, surrounded by a western landscape. Jesuit priest Nicolas Point traveled from St. Louis alongside missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet to serve Native Americans in present-day Montana and Idaho. Between 1841 and 1847, Point created over 600 sketches that he used as teaching aids, layering Christian elements over Native. In this drawing, he combined motifs of light (sun) and darkness (clouds) to convey conflict between grace and sin.

Jesuit Archives & Research Center 2021.159

after Karl Bodmer, Swiss, 1809–1893
engraved by Johann Hürlimann, Swiss, 1793–1850

Mató-Tópe, a Mandan Chief, 1843
hand-colored engraving and aquatint

This portrait of Mató-Tópe carefully articulates details relating the Mandan leader’s high rank, such as his exceptionally long split-horn headdress and feathered lance. His shirt of bighorn sheepskin is elaborately trimmed with ermine tails, locks of hair, and red marks representing wounds inflicted by enemies.

In 1833, portrait artist Karl Bodmer accompanied the Prussian naturalist Prince Maximilian von Wied on an expedition out of St. Louis up the Missouri River. Bodmer prioritized physical likeness in communicating Mató-Tópe’s status. In contrast, the leader’s robe in the center of this gallery communicates his authority through visual narratives.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2009.26.13 2021.157

Albert Bierstadt,
American (born Germany), 1830–1902

King Lake, California, c.1870–75
oil on canvas

Storm clouds dissipate as sunlight spills across a wilderness vista. Appearing available for possession, this landscape beckons the viewer with untold potential for prosperity. Eastern Americans felt entitled to the resources and success promised by such scenes, a belief termed Manifest Destiny. Paintings like this one by Albert Bierstadt erased all signs of Native Americans, suppressing acknowledgment of the violence of their forced removal from these western lands.

Bierstadt traveled overland from St. Louis, Missouri, to California in 1863. Upon return to his studio in Brooklyn, New York, he used sketches from his trip to create paintings that affirmed his white audience’s claims to the West.

Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Bequest of Rutherford H. Platt 2021.158

Alec William Soth,
American, born 1969

Cape Girardeau, Missouri,
from the series Sleeping by the Mississippi, 2002
chromogenic print

Silhouettes of former plaques on a faded wall remain as vestiges of a world now gone. An image of a grand American landscape is taped at the center. Similar to Albert Bierstadt’s landscape painting nearby, this cut-out evokes the ideology of Manifest Destiny, or the belief that Euro-Americans were divinely ordained to expand into western lands. However, Alec Soth’s photograph, made during road trips along the Mississippi River, questions the truth of this premise. The word “folklore” is also affixed to the wall, suggesting that the promise of the American Dream is a myth—a lie borne out by the scene’s unsettling emptiness.

Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Fund 2021.68

from top to bottom:

James F. Wilkins,
American (born England), 1808–1888

Crossing a Creek, 1849
pen and ink and graphite

Crossing the South Platte, 1849
pen and ink and graphite

The rolling hills along the Little Tarkio River north of St. Joseph, Missouri, are depicted in the top sketch. They present a sharp contrast to the flat, expansive landscape near present-day Brule, Nebraska, seen below.

James Wilkins sketched these scenes during a 151-day trip on the Overland Trail from St. Louis, Missouri, to California in 1849. Most of his traveling companions went west seeking gold. Wilkins sought a different gain, using his sketches to paint a moving panorama, a popular entertainment in which a long, painted canvas was scrolled between two vertical rollers. Wilkins showed his panorama in 1850–1851 to audiences primed by accounts of his arduous journey.

The Wisconsin Historical Society 2021.161, 2021.162

from left to right:

Nicholas Lowe,
American (born England), 1963

The View from Cahokia, Illinois to St. Louis, 2017
watercolor

Independence Rock and Devils Gate, Wyoming, 2017
watercolor

Though the landscapes in these watercolors are as expansive as those of James Wilkins nearby, they are marked by the inclusion of bridges, roads, fences, and even the Gateway Arch. The artist, Nicholas Lowe, retraced Wilkins’ 1849 journey on a six-week trek in 2017, documenting the same landscape in photography, video, and watercolor.

Wilkins was compelled by the singularity of the landscape. Lowe’s images, in contrast, convey the layers of human activity that has corralled the land and redefined it as a commodity from which to draw profit.

Courtesy of the artist 2021.76, 2021.77

from left to right:

Nicholas Lowe,
American (born England), 1963

Missouri: Little Tarkio Creek, 40°02’48.6″N 95°19’27.1″W, 2020
Apoxie clay, Aves mache, wood, acrylic paint, and acrylic fiber

Nebraska: North Platte River, 41°43’47.6″N 103°19’26.2″W, 2020
Apoxie clay, Aves mache, wood, acrylic paint, and acrylic fiber

Small slivers of land teeter atop spindly roots that find their base in a square of mottled metal. In one of the landscapes, a fork seems to have been hurled through the surface into its imagined depths below. Like Nicholas Lowe’s watercolors nearby, these two sculptures draw from his 2017 trek from St. Louis, Missouri, to present-day Placerville, California, retracing artist James Wilkins’ 1849 journey along the Overland Trail. The fork, found as debris along the journey, and the landscapes’ focus on routes speak to the artist’s search to “uncover and read the layers of meaning that might have been deposited in the landscape since Wilkins.”

Courtesy of the artist 2021.78, 2021.79

Robert Frank,
American (born Switzerland), 1924–2019

St. Louis, 1947
gelatin silver print

A lone man pauses along the Mississippi River levee in St. Louis to watch the train above him speed by. Taken by Robert Frank, one of the first road-trip photographers, this image captures the often-disconcerting overlap of movement and stasis in 20th-century life. Such an experience is especially evident in the confluence region. Major thoroughfares, such as Routes 40 and 66, mirror earlier overland trails as they traverse the region to carry untold numbers of travelers on an east-west path across the nation.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Robert Frank, 2000.354 2021.165

Lee Friedlander,
American, born 1934

St. Louis, from the series America by Car, 2002, printed 2003
gelatin silver print

St. Louis emphatically asserts mobility by situating the viewer in the driver’s seat of a car. The view of the city’s Old Courthouse and Gateway Arch is divided between two windows. These iconic structures represent a conflicted history. Enslaved peoples were sold on the steps of the courthouse where Dred Scott sued to gain freedom in 1846. And despite its sleek modernism, the Arch was erected to celebrate the colonialism responsible for dispossessing Native American nations of their lands. In a collision of history and movement, the photograph emphasizes the profound legacies of free mobility, forced mobility, and immobility.

Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Mary Jo and Ted P. Shen, BA 1966, MA (HON.) 2001; Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund 2021.164

Mississippian, Cahokia Mounds,
Madison County, Illinois

Gorget with Perforated Motifs, c.1200–1400
lightning whelk shell

Mississippian, East St. Louis site,
St. Clair County, Illinois

Kneeling Female Figure with a Shell (Exchange Avenue Figurine), c.1100–1200
Missouri flint clay

These objects demonstrate the vast trade networks that connected ancient Mississippian communities, which inhabited the present-day midwest and southeast United States from 900–1600. They were carved in Cahokia, then the largest cosmopolitan center in North America. Cahokian sculptors highly prized imported shells. The gorget, a pendant worn around the neck, was carved from a lightning whelk shell originating from the Gulf of Mexico. Its cross-in-circle motif represents an axis conveying the four cardinal directions. The flint clay figure holds a cup that would have been made from an imported shell.

Courtesy of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey 2021.9, 2021.10

Métis artist

Pad Saddle, mid-19th century
hide, wool cloth, glass beads, metal cones, and metal rings

Pad saddles served as essential equipment for Native peoples who traversed vast distances as participants in the fur trade. This colorful saddle is covered in black trade wool, ribbon, and stylized floral motifs made of glass beads. St. Louisan Robert Campbell, who made a fortune in the Northwest fur trade, likely acquired this pad saddle during his travels. With its beaded decoration, the saddle was an appropriate possession for Campbell. Earlier in the century, he was one of the largest importers of glass beads from Venice, Italy, for trade with Native Americans.

Campbell House Museum, St. Louis, MO 2021.75

Mató-Tópe,
Mandan, c.1784–1837

Robe, c.1835
hide, pigment, hair, and quills

Eight battle scenes surround a sun-like circle of abstracted eagle feathers. For the war leader Mató-Tópe and his fellow Mandan peoples, this robe constitutes a powerful narrative self-portrait. A devoted artist, Mató-Tópe carefully studied the work of European and American artists who visited him. In his robe, he incorporated European techniques of pictorial volume and depth into the pictographic conventions of Plains narrative art.

Mató-Tópe’s most famous battle is depicted next to the red cloth strip in the lower left corner of the robe. A grueling contest between a Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) chief, in green, and Mató-Tópe, on the right in red, ended in hand-to-hand combat. Mató-Tópe received a deep wound in his hand before killing the Tsistsistas enemy with their own knife.

Mató-Tópe and over 90% of the Mandan peoples tragically perished in 1837 during the smallpox epidemic. His robe, considered a pivotal work of Plains art, traveled down the Missouri River along trade routes from his winter home, in what is now North Dakota, to Kansas City, Missouri. It was purchased there later that year by merchant Alphons Schoch and displayed in his St. Louis home.

Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern 2021.95

from left to right:

Anna Maria von Phul,
American, 1786–1823

Native American Woman in St. Louis, 1818
watercolor

Creole Woman in St. Louis, 1818
watercolor

These delicately painted watercolors are some of the earliest images of St. Louis inhabitants. While visiting from Kentucky in 1817–1818, Anna Maria von Phul was captivated by the city’s dynamic mix of cultures and filled her sketchbooks with detailed impressions of the residents’ dress. The vermilion paint on the face and hair of the woman on the left indicates that she is likely a member of the Osage or Missouria Nations. The simple outfit and tignon (headwrap) of the woman on the right identify her as Creole, a community of French ancestry from New Orleans who founded St. Louis in the 1760s.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.48, 2021.47

Mary Susan Dant,
American, 1846–1918

Quilt, after 1886
cotton, silk, wool, and batting

Crazy quilts, such as this example, were constructed of fabric strips stitched together in a free-form design. This quilt’s creator, Mary Susan Dant, who lived near Hannibal, Missouri, likely had help in its construction from her three daughters Sallie, Evalina, and Rosa.

Like many other African Americans who were formerly enslaved, Dant needed to be thrifty in the years following emancipation. She reused materials at hand, like velvets, silks, worn clothing, and textiles, with sugar and salt sacks for the backing. Her quilt now serves her descendants as a testament to familial and communal resilience.

Property of Faye Dant, Joel Dant Sr., Joel Dant Jr., Kalecia & Jenni Dant 2021.58

Polish

Communion Chalice, 1707
silver with gilding

Trinity Lutheran Church, Altenburg, MO 2021.41

Saint Stanislaus Monstrance, 1927–28
gold, silver, platinum, and precious gems

Jesuit Archives & Research Center 2021.160

These ornate objects are intricately embellished with filigree and semi- precious gems. They symbolize the deep bonds that formed and sustain the communities that cherish them. In 1839, a group of 600 Saxon- German immigrants arrived in Perry Country, Missouri, seeking to practice their Lutheran faith freely. They brought this treasured chalice with them that continues to center the community’s history within the religion they observe today.

In 1923, St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Missouri, celebrated its centennial. Members of the Jesuit church donated precious metals and stones to create a monstrance, or ritual vessel, for their services. This monstrance, made by the papal court jeweler, incorporates the chapel’s architectural forms. Though the seminary no longer operates, the vessel testifies to its members’ generosity and care for their community’s well-being.

Wazhazhe (Osage) artists

Wedding Coat and Plume Hat, 1900s
cloth, metal, and feathers

Denver Art Museum: Native Arts Acquisition Fund, 1963.157, 1963.169, 2021.80, 2021.81

Epaulet Pair, c.1830
velvet, thread, and gold

Denver Art Museum: Gift of Mrs. Harry English, 1963.171A–B 2021.82a,b

Exuberantly dyed feather dusters and Osage-style ribbon work and embroidery adorn this coat and hat. Osage makers applied such embellishments to military jackets received as diplomatic gifts from the United States government. The coats symbolized status and were worn by brides for their weddings. This tradition persists, with Osage artists sourcing coats from military or band uniform suppliers.

Passed down through families, these garments have been folded into Osage culture and aesthetics, demonstrating the creativity with which Osage peoples have deployed non-Indigenous materials for their own uses.

French artist,
active North America

Armoire, 1780–1800
walnut with (replaced) tulip poplar

This armoire, or storage chest, with its curved front and distinctive feet exemplifies the rich cultural mix in the confluence region. Its bombé, or bowed, front is a French Louis XV style, and its front feet are a Creole version of the English Chippendale claw-and-ball style. Though likely made by a French-Canadian craftsperson, this unusual combination of elements differs from its French, English, and even French-Canadian predecessors.

Auguste Chouteau, a member of the area’s most prominent Creole family, commissioned this armoire. It joined the imported French silverware, crystal, and vast library that filled his elegant St. Louis home, then one of the largest in North America.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.45

William Kunze,
American, 1835–after 1880

Child’s Chair, c.1870–1900
wood

Though intended to be small enough to fit a child, this chair’s legs have also been shortened. The chair’s turned posts and back slats reflect a style from Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in present-day Germany and homeland of Dr. Charles Kuntze. One of many Germans who immigrated to Warren County, Missouri, in the 19th century, Kuntze taught chair-making to William, his enslaved laborer. William adapted this German style to his own aesthetic preferences. He chose hickory over maple wood, enlarged the seats, widened the spread between back slats, and fashioned distinctive rounded finials atop the posts.

Upon emancipation, William took the surname “Kunze,” dropping the “t” from Kuntze, and began producing chairs, such as this example, commercially.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St.Louis 2021.52

Art on Display

The works of art in this room graced homes and galleries in St. Louis during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their dense installation evokes the era’s style of art display.

Private collections and public exhibitions of art began in the 1810s. American explorer William Clark created the first museum west of the Mississippi River in 1816 to display his Native American art collection. The Mercantile Library was founded in 1846, and the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts— predecessor of today’s Saint Louis Art Museum—opened in 1881. The late 19th century saw the development of significant private collections, exhibitions, commercial galleries, and artists’ organizations.

In 1904, the St. Louis World’s Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) transformed Forest Park into a visual encyclopedia. This 7-month spectacle covered 1,200 acres and drew at least 19 million visitors. While the Fair promoted the city on a global stage and celebrated American artistic and technological innovation, many of its displays reinforced damaging stereotypes of non-white cultures. Most of the Fair’s structures no longer stand, though the Palace of Fine Arts building is now the Saint Louis Art Museum.

1. Thomas Wilmer Dewing, American, 1851–1938

Lady in White, c.1901
oil on panel

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase and the Eliza McMillan Trust 102:1988

2. Edmund Henry Wuerpel, American, 1866–1958

Mists o’ The Moors, c.1918
oil on canvas

Susan and Stephen Hunkins 2021.8

3. Frederick Oakes Sylvester, American, 1869–1915

The Mississippi at Elsah, 1903
oil on canvas

Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George Schriever, 86.65 2021.103

4. Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, American, 1830–1908

Zenobia in Chains, c.1859
marble

Saint Louis Art Museum, American Art Purchase Fund 19:2008

5. Plains artists

Shirt, early 19th century
hide, pigment, quills, and beads

Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern 2021.96

6. Jules Breton, French, 1827–1906

The Wounded Seagull, 1878
oil on canvas

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Justina G. Catlin in memory of her husband, Daniel Catlin 27:1917

7. Paul E. Harney, American, 1850–1915

Beyond Redemption, 1891
oil on canvas

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of John J. Oleski 710:2018

8. Halsey Cooley Ives, American, 1847–1911

Waste Lands, 1895
oil on canvas

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Charles Nagel 226:1909

August Gerber, German, active 1880–1910

Casts of West Frieze of Parthenon (Athens), Blocks IX and II, c.1904
painted plaster

These plaster casts of horses and riders, copied from the Parthenon temple in Athens, Greece, were displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Two identical casts were part of the initial collection of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, the city’s first public art museum and art school, which opened in 1881.

Casts of antiquities formed early collections in 19th-century American museums. They were exhibited to provide artistic and classical education to students and visitors.

Courtesy of Southeast Missouri State University 2021.171, 2021.172

Sebastiano Ricci, Italian, 1659–1734,
with Marco Ricci, Italian, 1676–1730

The Vision of St. Bruno, c.1700
oil on canvas

Bruno, a Christian saint, gestures toward a vision of angels. The vibrancy of Sebastiano Ricci’s scene hints at the extraordinary caliber of fine art in early St. Louis. This painting was part of a remarkable private collection of 17th-century European art on view in the frontier city. It belonged to Joseph Philipson, the first permanent Jewish resident of St. Louis, who arrived in 1807. His collection, numbering several hundred works, was one of the first west of the Mississippi and one of the most impressive anywhere in the early United States.

Elise Rannells Todd and Glenn W. Todd 2021.170

Hannah Brown Skeele,
American, 1829–1901

Fruit Piece, 1860
oil on canvas

Smooth ceramic, shiny silver, translucent glass, and the prickly, bumpy, and waxy rinds of fruits show off Hannah Brown Skeele’s talents at painting textures. In the mid-19th century, only wealthy St. Louisans—such as the painting’s first owner, banker Edgar Ames—would have had access to these exotic fruits.

In 1860, Skeele exhibited Fruit Piece at the first exhibition of the Western Academy of Art, the first professional art school in St. Louis. The school offered classes for both men and women, including Skeele. It was, unfortunately, only short-lived, with the Civil War (1861–1865) forcing its closure.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by Charles C. Haffner, III, Mrs. Harold T. Martin, Mrs. Herbert A Vance, and Jill Burnside Zeno; through prior acquisition of the George F. Harding Collection, 2001.6 2021.166

1. Charles Deas, American, 1818–1867

Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga in a Bark Lodge, 1840–42
oil on canvas

Collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis 2021.38

2. Harry Chase, American, 1853–1889

Netting Fish, c.1880
oil on canvas

Jack and Susan Musgrave 2021.105

3. Edmonia Lewis, American, 1844 –1907

Bust of James Peck Thomas, 1874
marble

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, 2002.3 2021.155

4. Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, 1883
oil on canvas

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Bequest of Charles Parsons, 1905 WU2174 2021.173

5. James McArdell, British, 8. c.1729–1765
after Anthony van Dyck, Flemish, 1599–1641

Time Clipping the Wings of Love, c.1765
mezzotint

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. G. L. Moore 165:1944

6. Lenape (Delaware) artist

Shoulder Bag, c.1835
hide, wool cloth, cotton cloth, silk, quills, metal cones, and horsehair

Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern 2021.97

7. Joseph Rusling Meeker, American, 1827–1887

The Land of Evangeline, 1874
oil on canvas

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Wright Prescott Edgerton in memory of Dr. and Mrs. W.T. Helmuth by exchange 163:1946

8. Oscar Edward Berninghaus, American, 1874–1952

Marquette and Joliet on the Mississippi, 1907
oil on canvas

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of August A. Busch Jr. 151:1976

Japanese,
Meiji period (1868–1912)

Vase with Design of Seasonal Flowers, c.1904
cloisonné enamel

Two red-crowned cranes step carefully among plum blossoms, chrysanthemums, morning glories, lotuses, and roses—flowers representing the four seasons. The artist created the designs on this strikingly large vase using the Japanese technique of cloisonné, in which compartments outlined by fine wires are filled with colored glass paste, or enamel.

This vase is characteristic of the ambitious, large-scale works of art created for the Fair. St. Louisans John and Mary Ruth purchased it from a display of Japanese artworks in the Palace of Varied Industries.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift from the family of John F. and Mary S. Ruth, in their memory 748:1991

1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair both reinforced and dismantled cultural and artistic hierarchies in its displays. No previous world’s fair had brought together so many people and works of art from so many different cultures. Colonializing ideologies underpinned how these diverse cultures were exhibited. For example, the Philippine Reservation was designed to introduce Americans to the Philippines, acquired as a colony by the United States in 1898. Far from a celebration of Filipino cultures, the reservation attempted to present Filipino peoples as “uncivilized” to justify the United States’ extraction of profits from their islands’ rich natural resources.

Yet some Fair displays broke down established hierarchies of artistic media and challenged Eurocentric cultural prejudices. For the first time ever, a world’s fair included the decorative arts and Native American arts in its official fine arts display. Halsey Cooley Ives, head of the Fair’s art department, believed that “all artwork in which the artist-producer has worked with conviction and knowledge is recognized as equally deserving of respect.”

Cecilia Beaux,
American, 1855–1942

The Dreamer, 1894
oil on canvas

Caroline Kilby Smith, a friend of artist Cecilia Beaux, regards her viewers with a direct gaze. Her portrait exemplified “the perfection of modern technique,” as a critic noted, with its confrontational figure, flattened space, loose brushwork, and abstract interior.

The Dreamer was one of Beaux’s best-known paintings due to its frequent appearances in juried exhibitions from New York to Paris. In 1904, it was one of approximately 11,000 works of art installed in the Palace of Fine Arts, where it earned Beaux a gold medal for her accomplishments as a portraitist.

Loan courtesy of The Butler Institute of American Art, Museum purchase 1929 2021.153

Chitimacha artist

Basket with Lid, c.1900
river cane and dye

Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA. Purchased from Miss McIlhenny, 1906. NA1363A&B 2021.175a,b

Mono artist

Basket, 1880–1900
sedge root, grass, redbud, and bracken fern root

The George Wharton James Collection, Southwest Museum of the American Indian Collection, Autry Museum, Los Angeles 2021.174

The Fair featured displays of Native American art across multiple commercial, governmental, ethnographic, and fine art venues. An artist from the Mono culture in California created the basket embellished with small human figures and rows of rattlesnake and triangle patterns. It was shown as part of the first-ever exhibition of Native American artwork in a world’s fair fine arts display.

A Chitimacha artist used an intricate double- weave technique to create the complex pattern on the lidded basket. It was displayed in the Louisiana State Pavilion as an educational example of the state’s Indigenous craft traditions. Wealthy philanthropists Mary Bradford and Sara McIlhenny, however, organized the basket display to advocate for federal recognition of the Chitimacha Tribe.

Winslow Homer,
American, 1836–1910

Early Morning After a Storm at Sea, 1900–1903
oil on canvas

Powerful Atlantic waves pound against the rocks on the rugged Maine coast. The water’s surface flickers in the sunlight, just beginning to break through the clouds after a storm. For the last 25 years of his life, Winslow Homer observed the moods of the sea and translated them into profoundly dramatic compositions.

Homer proclaimed this work “the best picture of the sea that I have painted.” The Fair’s jury agreed and awarded the artist a gold medal. Collector William K. Bixby then purchased the painting from the Fair and hung it in his St. Louis home.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of J.H. Wade 1924.195 2021.182

John Rufus Denman, American, 1876–1956,
and Patrick H. Walker, American, 1868–1954
made for Libbey Glass Company, Toledo, Ohio, founded 1818

Punch Bowl and Stand, 1903–1904
glass

Toledo Museum of Art, Gift of Libbey Glass Company, division of Owens-Illinois Glass Company, 1946.27A,B 2021.183a,b

Mermod & Jaccard Jewelry Company,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1883–1905
made for Libbey Glass Company, Toledo, Ohio, founded 1818

Punch Bowl Ladle, 1904
sterling silver and glass

Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds given by Mr. and Mrs. George L. and Leslie A. Chapman, 2015.49 2021.184

Once proclaimed the “Largest Piece of Cut Glass in the World,” this massive punch bowl weighs 134 pounds and holds 15 gallons. It dazzled visitors to the Palace of Varied Industries at the Fair. With complex patterns, purity of color, and prismatic brilliance, it showcased the superior craftsmanship and design of the best glassmakers at the Libbey Glass Company in Ohio.

The punch bowl served as the centerpiece in the glittering mirrored booth of St. Louis-based Mermod & Jaccard Jewelry Company, which produced its accompanying ladle. The bowl made good on its showstopping ambitions, winning the Fair’s Grand Prize Medal for cut glass.

Komuro Suiun,
Japanese, 1874–1945
Meiji period (1868–1912)

Summer Scene with Solitary Duck amidst Rose Mallow and River Reeds, 1903 or 1904
hanging scroll: ink, color, and oyster-shell- white pigment (gofun) on silk

A female mallard duck perches at water’s edge beside blossoming rose mallow and lush river reeds. This fine example of bird-and-flower painting (kachō-ga) was exhibited at the Fair alongside Japanese ceramics, metalwork, lacquerware, and textiles. For only the second time at a world’s fair, Japanese art was included in the fine arts section and displayed in a pavilion near the Palace of Fine Arts.

Saint Louis Art Museum, The Langenberg Endowment Fund 101:2017

Edwin E. Codman, American
(born England), 1876 –1955
made by Gorham Manufacturing Company, Providence, Rhode Island, founded 1831

Candelabrum entitled “Morning,” 1904
silver

The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. Frank L. Sulzberger, 1984.44 2021.167

Van Briggle Pottery Company,
Colorado Springs, Colorado, founded 1899

Vase, 1904
glazed stoneware with copper-plated metal mount

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Leeds Art Foundation in honor of Brent R. Benjamin 308:2020

Many designers sold their work at the Fair, showing off their abilities in the most up-to-date styles. The candelabrum’s abstract floral motifs and its figure’s flowing hair embody the organic elegance of Art Nouveau design. The vase with yucca plant decoration combines Art Nouveau’s sinuous lines with the restraint and clarity of the Arts and Crafts movement.

These objects were offered for sale by the Gorham Manufacturing Company and Van Briggle Pottery Company at neighboring booths in the Palace of Varied Industries. The building’s 14 acres of merchandise earned it the nickname “the shopping center of the Fair.” Both firms also exhibited showstopping objects in the Palace of Fine Arts, for which they were awarded gold medals.

Visayan artist,
The Philippine Islands

Cloth, late 19th century
pineapple fiber, silk, and cotton

Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA. Gift of Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016. 2016-20-35 2021.176

Visayan artist,
The Philippine Islands

Cloth, late 19th century
pineapple fiber and cotton

Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA. Gift of Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016. 2016-20-37 2021.177

Filipino artist,
The Philippine Islands

Cloth, before 1904
possibly pineapple fiber and cotton

Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA. Gift of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum (also known as the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2003. 2003-31-33 2021.178

Delicate embroidery embellishes the shimmering surfaces of these textiles, made from pineapple fibers native to the Philippines. Filipino artists and craftspeople also used other native plants—rattan and nito in particular—to weave objects such as these baskets with eye-catching patterns and the richly textured backpack.

The Philippine Reservation comprised 130 different buildings spread across 47 acres and was described as a fair within the Fair. Organizers restricted the Reservation’s fine art gallery to objects made by Filipino artists working in European-derived styles of painting and sculpture.

Equally accomplished Filipino Indigenous forms, such as the textiles and basketry in this case, were categorized as commercial products and displayed in the Department of Manufactures exhibit. This segregation of object type by exhibition venue reinforced colonizing judgments that defined Indigenous works as less advanced artistic expressions.

Pala’wan artist,
The Philippine Islands

Basket, before 1904
rattan, bamboo, and nito

Pala’wan artist,
The Philippine Islands

Basket, before 1904
rattan and nito

Filipino artist,
The Philippine Islands

Man’s Backpack, before 1904
rattan and peel

Stephanie Syjuco,
American (born Philippines), 1974

Block Out the Sun, 2019
pigment prints, mounted on aluminum

In 2019, Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco photographed her hands as they obscured faces of Filipinos in images taken at the Fair in 1904. Organizers had brought more than 1,100 Filipinos to St. Louis to perform as living exhibits in recreated villages on the Philippine Reservation. Professional and amateur photographers took many images of these villages. Such images transform their subjects into unwilling actors in disempowering and long-lasting historical, political, and social narratives.

Block Out the Sun disrupts these narratives by literally blocking out the viewer’s ability to scrutinize these Filipino individuals. Syjuco’s hands challenge the power of the anthropological gaze, which seeks to define its subjects through reductive visual judgments.

Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York 2021.185.1-.28

Art in Production

For over 1,000 years, artists, designers, and craftspeople in the confluence region have created products that sell. This gallery brings together objects made for sale—furniture, musical instruments, bricks, weather vanes, coverlets, portraits, and more. It also considers works that convince others to buy an idea, such as architectural design drawings, and those that promote their maker’s reputation, such as a young woman’s decorative needlework.

Many artists and entrepreneurs took advantage of the confluence region’s abundant natural resources to establish and sustain their businesses. These industries followed similar patterns of growth and decline. They began as small-scale enterprises before the American Civil War (1861–1865), expanded through industrialized production, and then often returned to individual, artisanal uses.

At first glance, the objects in this gallery may seem to share few characteristics. Here, they are united by material or form and arranged into six groups to trace the changes and continuities that connect them. For example, the confluence region boasts some of the continent’s richest clay deposits. As a result, clay objects—whether for personal use or sale— have contributed to the identity of this region for centuries.

Mississippian,
BBB Motor site, St. Clair County, Illinois

Kneeling Female Figure Hoeing a Serpent Creature (Birger Figurine), c.1100–1200
Missouri flint clay

Courtesy of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey 2021.11

Hydraulic Press Brick Company,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1868–1972

Bricks, c.1890
dry pressed brick clay

National Building Arts Center 2021.13, 2021.15

Artists working at the ancient Mississippian metropolis of Cahokia specialized in sculptures carved from flint clay. One of the earliest examples of clay sculpture in the exhibition, Kneeling Female Figure Hoeing a Serpent Creature, is believed to represent a deity known as the Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies. Associated with fertility and agriculture, the figure was excavated from a farmstead site a few miles from Cahokia. The damage to the figure’s head occurred during its excavation in 1979.

By 1900, St. Louis had become the world’s largest brick-making city. Uniformly sized and densely compacted, bricks made by the Hydraulic Press Brick Company were the safe and stylish choice for building facades in the last quarter of the 19th century. Both utilitarian and ornamental versions adorned hundreds of structures across the United States, including the Saint Louis Art Museum’s own Sculpture Hall.

Winkle Terra Cotta Company,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1883–1955

Sunflower Cornice, Panel, and Base, c.1885
architectural terra cotta

A cheery sunflower curves gracefully to fill the dimensions of this panel. Intended for a house or small commercial building, this architectural ornament demonstrates the abilities of the Winkle Terra Cotta Company. The company’s founder, Joseph Winkle, trained in the clay-manufacturing center of Staffordshire, England. He brought his experience to St. Louis and established the city’s first major terra cotta firm, located at the present-day intersection of Manchester Road and Hampton Avenue, south of Forest Park. The company translated inventive, organic designs into the relatively economical, and saleable, material of terra cotta (Latin for burnt earth).

National Building Arts Center 2021.14a–g

Dan Anderson,
American, born 1945

European Water Tank, 1996
stoneware

This massive vessel resembles a water tower with a drum-shaped reservoir rising from a narrow column. Its surface was blackened by exposure to smoke and then sandblasted to bring out different colors and textures, reminiscent of decaying buildings.

The brick-making and architectural terra cotta industries in the confluence region diminished in the 20th century due to changes in building techniques and styles. Regional artists, however, continue to work with clay. Based in Edwardsville, Illinois, Dan Anderson creates sculptures such as European Water Tank that express his interest in the architectural presence of industrial structures within the environment.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Thomas Alexander and Laura Rogers 1121:2010a,b

Regional Products of National Importance

The abundant metal and mineral resources of the Southeast Missouri Lead District arguably had an even greater impact on the state’s economic development than clay. The confluence region contains the world’s highest concentration of galena, the natural mineral form of lead, as well as significant quantities of iron and zinc. The proximity of these large deposits to St. Louis’ transportation networks brought about regional businesses of national significance. Metalwork production ranged from cast-iron furniture and stoves in the 1850s to the resurgence of blacksmithing as an artistic medium in the 1960s.

One of the most important firms was the National Enameling and Stamping Company, which achieved prominence in the 1870s for its durable, sanitary, and eye-catching graniteware, fashioned from enamel-coated sheets of iron. The company’s leaders founded Granite City, Illinois, a center for iron and steel manufacturing.

In other instances, immigrants to the confluence region drew from their homeland traditions to build industries that gained national prominence. From corncob pipes to zithers and rifles to stained glass, these businesses shaped the identities of their local communities.

Siegfried Reinhardt, American (born East Prussia), 1925–1984
made by Emil Frei & Associates, St. Louis, Missouri, founded 1898

St. Mark, c.1951,
from the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Headquarters, 210 N. Broadway, St. Louis

The Christian New Testament author St. Mark stands against a background of saturated blue. He is accompanied by his traditional symbol of a winged lion. Siegfried Reinhardt designed this window, and a stained-glass cutter carefully executed Reinhardt’s design. The cutter selected pieces of brightly colored glass and treated them with a range of innovative techniques, including direct painting and etching.

St. Mark demonstrates the artistic vitality and longevity of Emil Frei & Associates. An internationally recognized, regionally based art-making enterprise, it has been in continuous operation by the Frei family for over a century.

International Center of The Lutheran Church– Missouri Synod in Kirkwood, Missouri 2021.186

L. Brent Kington,
American, 1934–2013

Weathervane, 1977
forged and welded steel

Imagine viewing Weathervane during a windstorm. Balanced atop a needle-like point, the horizontal element of hard, unyielding steel would spin and twist with abandon. Despite the seemingly unequal distribution of its weight, it remains in perfect balance.

The steel sculpture’s design introduces a series of contradictions at the heart of L. Brent Kington’s artistic practice. Upon joining the faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in the 1960s, he became inspired by the region’s strong ironworking tradition and led the international resurgence of blacksmithing as an artistic medium.

Collection of the Illinois State Museum, 1977.063.005 Museum Purchase 2021.187

E. Jaccard & Co.,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1852 –1871

Presentation Pitcher, c.1854
coin silver

Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Fred R. Salisbury II Fund in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Decorative Arts Council 2021.65

Maria Regnier,
American (born Hungary), 1901–1994

Coffeepot, 1945–50
sterling silver and wood

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. John Goodman 22:1989.1a,b

St. Louis Stamping Company, St. Louis, Missouri, 1866–1899
with parts by Manning, Bowman, & Co., Meriden, Connecticut, 1849–1945

Granite Ware Coffeepot, c.1885
graniteware and pewter

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.53

Antoine Oneille,
American (born Canada), 1764 –1820

Pitcher, 1810–15
silver

Yale University Art Gallery, Josephine Setze Fund for the John Marshall Phillips Collection 2021.163

These vessels demonstrate the range of styles and price points of metalwork created in the confluence region. The graceful curves of Antoine Oneille’s Pitcher communicate the sophistication and French cultural heritage of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. The exuberant Presentation Pitcher was commissioned from E. Jaccard & Co. to celebrate the first railroad connecting the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. The St. Louis Enameling Company made more affordable products, such as Granite Ware Coffeepot, from sheets of iron coated with enamel in eye-catching patterns. Maria Regnier rejected such mass- produced designs. The starkly simple Coffeepot, created in her small-scale workshop, harkens back in its production methods to early metalsmithing practices in the region.

Excelsior Stove Works,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1849–1943

Parlor Cook Stove, No. 7, c.1860–69
cast iron

Gracefully curved legs and elaborate scroll, shield, and scallop patterns embellish this cast-iron stove. Used for both heating and cooking, it would have been a decorative and practical addition to a 19th-century parlor. An ornate lid with an oversize handle covers a cooking surface on the stove’s top. A baking compartment is inside the upper hinged doors while fuel burned behind the lower doors.

Excelsior Stove Works was the largest stove manufacturer in the country in the second half of the 19th century. It shipped stoves nationwide from its St. Louis riverfront factory.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St.Louis 2021.189

Pullis Bros.,
St. Louis, Missouri, 1839–1896

Garden Bench,
1856–73 painted cast iron

Abundant floral decorations, interlocking ovals with rosettes, and leafy curved legs distinguish this garden bench. The curvilinear designs are hallmarks of the Rococo Revival style, which was at the height of popularity when this bench was made.

Pullis Brothers was one of nine major St. Louis iron works that flourished in the second half of the 19th century, producing decorative furniture, fences, and cast-iron storefronts. The city’s proximity to southeast Missouri iron deposits, along with access to river and rail transportation, made St. Louis a center of ornamental cast-iron production.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.49

Mississippian,
near Malden, Dunklin County, Missouri

Copper Repoussé Plate Depicting Birdman, c.1200–1400
copper

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of J. Max Wulfing, 1937 WU3679 2021.190

August Leonhard,
American (born Germany), 1804 –1889

Weathervane, mid-1840s
tinned sheet iron with gilding

Historic Hermann Inc., Hermann, Missouri 2021.63

Though crafted nearly 700 years apart, these two metal sculptures depict imagery important to their communities. August Leonhard sculpted Weathervane for the first church built in Hermann, Missouri. The town was established in 1836 by a group of immigrants in response to fears that they were losing their distinctive German culture. Leonhard chose the form of a rooster, a symbol with rich meaning in Christianity. Perched atop a steeple on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, the rooster’s gilded surface would have shimmered in the sun, a landmark at the heart of its community.

The Birdman plate shows a figure with both falcon and human traits. The Birdman is central to the ancient Mississippian culture, with connections to warfare, ritual dancing, and sports. Cahokian artists used copper likely imported from the Great Lakes region to create portable artworks like this plate, which conveyed the power associated with the city. Objects bearing Birdman imagery were crucial in the interaction between the elites of Mississippian centers. See additional copper plates on view in Ancient American Gallery 113.

General Douglas MacArthur, American, 1880–1964
made by Missouri Meerschaum Company, Washington, Missouri, founded 1907

MacArthur 5-Star Corn Cob Pipe, designed 1951
corncob, wood, and plastic

Henry Tibbe, American
(born Netherlands), 1819–1896 made by H. Tibbe & Son Co., Washington, Missouri, 1869–1907

Original Corn Cob Pipe, designed 1878
corncob, bamboo, and metal

Missouri Meerschaum Company, Washington, Missouri, founded 1907

Corn Cob Pipe, c.1940
corncob and plastic

Though varied in design, these three pipes demonstrate the innovation and style of the Missouri Meerschaum Company, the world’s oldest and largest manufacturer of corn cob pipes. Founder Henry Tibbe used his woodturning skills to fashion pipes out of corncobs, patenting his process of adding plaster to harden and fire-proof the cob. Tibbe, a Dutch immigrant, connected his new and old countries by combining local Missouri corn with European pipe traditions, naming his company Meerschaum after a traditional Dutch pipe. The largest pipe was made from a design proposed by General Douglas MacArthur.

Washington Historical Society, Washington, MO 2021.62.1, 2021.62.2, 2021.62.3

Samuel Hawken,
American, 1792–1884

Plains Rifle, c.1855
steel and wood

Finely crafted of local wood and iron, with an octagonal barrel and scrolled trigger grip, this rifle, handmade by Samuel Hawken in St. Louis, was a well-known symbol of the frontier. Fur traders, trappers, and explorers throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains prized the firearm because of its light weight and reputation for both accuracy and long range. Many travelers heading west through the confluence region stopped at the Hawken brothers’ shop to place orders for one of their celebrated rifles.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.44

Franz Schwarzer, American (born Austria), 1828–1904

Concert Zither, 1876
wood and inlay

Delicate vines inlaid with mother-of-pearl enliven the surface of this Concert Zither, created for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. A zither is a stringed instrument played by plucking the strings while it is lying flat. Washington, Missouri, was home to Franz Schwarzer, who oversaw the largest zither factory in the country, in operation from the 1860s through 1950s. His instruments were shipped across Europe and the Americas, where they were celebrated both for their quality of sound and artistry of their woodworking.

Washington Historical Society, Washington, MO 2021.61

In-gallery zither music recording by:

Tomy Temerson,
German, born 1973

Zithermusik mit Tomy Temerson, Vols. 1 and 2, 2005

Portraiture

The idea of a portraitist at work, standing behind a canvas or camera to create an image of their subject, might seem entirely unrelated to an industrialized assembly line. But portraiture can also be considered an industry because its producers create a closely related set of goods.

In the 17th century, colonists brought European conventions of portraiture with them to North America, where they took root. As Missouri towns expanded during the 19th century, so too did the portraiture industry. Artists traveled to the region to meet the population’s growing demand for images of themselves that would demonstrate their social, economic, and familial ambitions.

By the 1840s, photography began to expand portraiture’s conventions and expectations. Today, contemporary artists continue to challenge the fundamentals of portraiture: who is portrayed, why, and how.

Chester Harding,
American, 1792–1866

Daniel Boone, 1820
oil on pieced canvas

Depicted with a full head of white hair, Daniel Boone meets the viewer with a strong, direct gaze. Chester Harding is the only artist to have painted the legendary frontiersman from life. He created a full-length portrait of Boone, replicated in the print to the right. When the portrait sustained damage, Harding salvaged the area surrounding the head and fastened it to the canvas seen here.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 2021.98

James Otto Lewis, American, 1799–1858
after Chester Harding, American, 1792–1866

Col. Daniel Boone, 1820
stipple engraving

In this engraving after a full-length portrait by Chester Harding, Daniel Boone wears a buckskin coat with his hat in hand. Details convey Boone’s well-known frontier identity: knife tucked in his belt, hunting dog at his feet, and a prominently featured long rifle. The cut tree limb hints at his role as a tamer of the wilderness. Lewis and Harding offered the print for sale shortly after Boone’s death and attracted over 200 subscribers eager to have an image of the famed frontiersman. This print is one of the earliest-known engravings made in St. Louis.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 71:1943

Francois M. Guyol de Guiran,
French (active North America), 1773/ 77–1849

Portrait of a Gentleman and His Daughter, c.1805–15
watercolor on ivory and painted paper

A young girl gazes up at her father in this tender double portrait. Francois M. Guyol de Guiran was the first resident artist in St. Louis, where he painted miniatures, or small-scale artworks, such as this. Since the portrait’s support—a luminous sheet of ivory—did not fill its entire frame, the artist added a piece of paper embellished with foliage, on the left. This unusual combination of materials reflects the challenge of working in an outpost, far from a consistent source of artists’ supplies.

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, by exchange, 2001 (2001.95) 2021.191

Thomas Martin Easterly,
American, 1809–1882

Robert J. Wilkinson, Barber of the Southern Hotel, c.1860
daguerreotype

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.56

Thomas Martin Easterly,
American, 1809–1882

Keokuk, or the Watchful Fox, 1847
hand-colored daguerreotype

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.54

Thomas Martin Easterly,
American, 1809–1882

Unidentified Mother and Small Son, c.1850
hand-colored daguerreotype

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.57

Thomas Martin Easterly,
American, 1809–1882

Thomas Forsyth, Mountain Spy and Guide, 1847
daguerreotype

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.55

Daguerreotypes

Thomas Martin Easterly created a collective portrait of the confluence region through his daguerreotypes. In this early
type of photography, artists captured one-of-a-kind images on silver-coated copper plates. Easterly’s camera recorded the candid expressions of hundreds of St. Louis residents and visitors, such as a little boy’s scowl or a man’s furrowed brow. His psychologically penetrating portrait of the Sauk and Fox leader Keokuk is considered the first photographic portrait of a Native American.

Easterly also photographed the area’s African American residents, such as Robert J. Wilkinson. Many may have agreed with American abolitionist Frederick Douglass that the “democratic art” of photography allowed African Americans to appear as individuals rather than as reductive stereotypes. Faster to make and less expensive to purchase than paintings, daguerreotypes changed expectations for and access to portraiture.

American artist, active Potosi, Missouri

Portrait of Hannah and Joseph Cresswell, early 1840s
oil on canvas

Hannah Cresswell and her youngest son, Joseph, sat patiently while a traveling artist, whose identity is currently unknown, recorded details of their clothing and facial features. The limited ability to convey form or anatomy suggests that this painter was self-taught. However, the artist endowed the Cresswells with no less individuality than seen in the nearby portrait by academically trained Manuel de Franca.

The Cresswell family commissioned portraits for their new home near Potosi, Missouri. These works celebrate their rising wealth from the mill and furnace they owned, which were powered by both free and enslaved laborers.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Cresswell Farm, LLC 197:2017

Manuel Joachim de Franca,
American (born Portugal), 1808–1865

Alfred Worsley Kennedy, c.1844
oil on canvas

Dr. Alfred Worsley Kennedy stares intently into the distance, positioned before a darkened sky and tense horse. Kennedy himself seems undisturbed by the turbulent setting, suggesting the calm, unflappable demeanor he developed as an army surgeon.

Kennedy commissioned images of himself and his wife from St. Louis’ most popular portraitist, Manuel de Franca, perhaps to commemorate their marriage. Known for his dramatic brushwork and romantic sensibilities, de Franca brought skills to the city that he had honed through academic training in Portugal.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.46

Cayce Zavaglia,
American, born 1971

Emmylou, 2019
hand embroidery: crewel wool on Belgian linen with acrylic

Are those brushstrokes or stitches? Trained as a painter, Cayce Zavaglia practices what she calls “renegade embroidery” by using thread as a drawing tool. Her embroidered portraits of family members and friends challenge the longstanding perception that needlework is less of a fine art than painting.

Zavaglia also asks viewers to consider which side of the portrait, the front or the back, they value. On the
back side of Emmylou (see image) is a second, typically unseen image, an uncanny double formed by the embroidery process. Acknowledging this second portrait is central to the artist, as it opens “a conversation about the divergence between our presented and private selves.”

Sam and Barbara Wells 2021.17

Susan Bushey,
American, 1827–1905

Embroidered Sampler, 1838
linen embroidered with silk

Eleven-year-old Susan Bushey confidently stitched the brick facade of the Fourth Street Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis, surrounded by a profusion of flora and fauna. She may have felt homesick when she created this sampler while attending a boarding school for young women 200 miles away from her St. Louis-based family. Or perhaps she hoped to express her industriousness, creativity, and piety to demonstrate her character and ability to manage a future home. And, indeed, it worked: she met her future husband through her family ties to the very church she depicted here.

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Mabel Herbert Harper, 1957 (57.122.756) 2021.192

John Eusebius Schneider,
American (born Germany), 1823–1903

Coverlet, 1868
wool and cotton

Filled with floral motifs, such as tumbling oak leaves and twisting vines, this coverlet represents the height of innovation and style in mid-19th-century textiles. The Jacquard loom attachment, a mechanical punch-card device that was cutting-edge technology at the time, made possible such intricate, large-scale patterns. John Eusebius Schneider was the first Missouri weaver known to have used one.

This coverlet’s combination of chrome green and dark blue is unusual. The choice of colors likely came from the clients who commissioned it. Or, possibly it was chosen by Schneider’s wife, Catherine, who spun and dyed the wool at their farm in St. Charles County, Missouri.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Decorative Arts Society Funds 61:1979

Lillian Glaser,
American, 1888–1931

Thunder Bird Wall Hanging, 1929
wool and cotton

Vibrant patterns, inspired by the colors of the American southwest, embellish Lillian Glaser’s wall hanging. An innovative instructor in the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Glaser encouraged bold experimentation and brought about the revival of artistic weaving in the city. Glaser’s students established the Weavers’ Guild of St. Louis in 1926. The Guild continues today as the second-oldest group of its kind in the United States.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Edmund H. Wuerpel 138:1952

Textiles

Regional textile artists marketed themselves through their skills with thread, fiber, and fabric. Textile production occurred in varied contexts and for diverse purposes. Although women were typically associated with the production of quilts as a domestic endeavor, men dominated as commercial weavers in the 19th century. The textile field also offered professional opportunities to women through occupations as seamstresses and dressmakers. Textile design and creation were not considered fine art until the early 20th century, with Washington University in St. Louis among the leaders in this shift.

While many textile artists made a living by selling their products, others reaped more indirect benefits. In early 19th-century America, a young woman’s education was intended as preparation for her primary occupation: managing a home. Novice seamstresses perfected their sewing skills by embroidering samplers, which also allowed them to demonstrate their patience, diligence, and refinement. Such textiles played a consequential role in communicating the domestic and moral characteristics that would signal their makers’ suitability for marriage.

attributed to Anna Jane Parker,
American, c.1841–1918

Quilt Top, Pieced Log Cabin, 1875–1900
silk and cotton, with some earlier textiles

This quilt top’s dramatic design of light and dark diamonds is striking from a distance. When viewed up close, the strips of dress silks and ribbons create 110 small squares, each centered with red or pink, that form the Log Cabin pattern. Anna Jane Parker collected these textile remnants from her business as a professional seamstress and dressmaker. Though born into slavery in North Carolina, she was emancipated before moving to St. Louis by 1860. The quilt, which remained unfinished without any batting or backing, was passed down in Parker’s family until the 1970s.

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Gift of Jean and Jerry Jackson and Bob and Helen Jackson Brewster 2021.194

Design Drawings

Every object in Art Along the Rivers began with an idea, perhaps followed by an initial sketch or a prototype. Some drawings that communicate their designers’ innovations might then have been patented or handed off to another craftsperson for fabrication. Presentation drawings convey an architect’s initial, ambitious idea. Construction drawings reveal the collaborations between architects, engineers, and contractors.

This gallery presents drawings of some of the confluence region’s architectural landmarks: the Gateway Arch, Eads Bridge, Saint Louis Priory Chapel, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Since we are unable to bring the structures themselves within the walls of the Museum, they are encountered indirectly through their designs. Although the drawings on view here were all created as tools for larger projects, they are also artistic objects, valued in this exhibition for their aesthetic and technical qualities.

Siegfried Reinhardt, American (born East Prussia), 1925–1984
for Emil Frei & Associates, St. Louis, Missouri, founded 1898

Baptism of St. Augustine, for the Church of the Annunziata, Ladue, Missouri, c.1952
charcoal, black chalk, crayon, and graphite

This drawing is filled with Siegfried Reinhardt’s characteristically energetic lines, animated juxtapositions of patterns and textures, and elongated, fragmented forms. In the early 1950s, the Church of the Annunziata in Ladue, Missouri, commissioned a series of stained-glass windows from Emil Frei & Associates. To create the designs, the company turned to Reinhardt, one of their regular collaborators and a leading postwar artist in St. Louis.

To communicate his ideas to the stained-glass cutter, Reinhardt created this full-sized cartoon, or preparatory drawing. Designs such as this one established Emil Frei & Associates as innovative leaders in modern religious stained glass.

Emil Frei & Associates, Inc., St. Louis, MO 2021.37

designed by C. W. and Geo. L. Rapp, Chicago, Illinois, 1907–1965
made by Winkle Terra Cotta Company, St. Louis, Missouri, 1883–1955

Piers, Spandrels, and Window Trim, Ambassador Theatre and Office Building, 1925
ink

This construction drawing resembles a jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of carefully numbered pieces. It was the key used to install each terra cotta block on the facade of the Ambassador Theatre, formerly located in downtown St. Louis. The drawing’s numbers corresponded to the monumental ornaments above the building’s main entrance.

The theatre was designed by Rapp & Rapp architectural firm, which contracted Winkle Terra Cotta Company to fabricate the “modern Renaissance” ornamentation seen in the drawing. The building was demolished in 1996, although the facade has been preserved by the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois.

American Terra Cotta Collection, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. 2021.195

Cass Gilbert, American, 1859–1934
drawn by William Pinckney Foulds, American, 1879–1947

Forest Park, Saint Louis, Missouri: Showing Reclamation and Restoration of World’s Fair Grounds and Museum of Fine Arts, 1916
graphite, pen and ink, and wash

In this grandiose vision of Art Hill, terraces and gardens thrive, trees line promenades, fountains cascade, and bridges cross the River Des Peres. All of this culminates at the top with an elaborately expanded art museum. Although built just 12 years earlier as the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1904 World’s Fair, by 1916 the Museum was already eager to expand. Cass Gilbert’s plans detailed here attempted to recapture the magnificence of the Fair but were ultimately deemed too costly and were never realized.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 117:1979

Camille Noel Dry, American (born France), 1843–1919
published by Richard Jordan Compton, American, 1833–1899

Plates 1 and 2, from Pictorial St. Louis: The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley, 1876
lithograph

These two pages depict the St. Louis riverfront in extraordinary detail, with steamboats on the levee, carriages crossing Eads Bridge, and buildings crowding downtown streets. To create this book with bird’s-eye views of St. Louis, draftsman Camille Dry and assistants created detailed portraits of every structure in the city. Each is numbered and identified at the bottom of every page. With 110 lithographic prints covering an area of nearly 70 miles, Pictorial St. Louis was the largest and most ambitious of the many panoramic city views that were published in 19th-century America.

Richardson Memorial Library, Saint Louis Art Museum 2021.196

from left to right:

Typical Shell Sections, Saint Louis Priory Church (Drawing S-5), 1960
graphite, ink, and printing ink on drafting linen

Saint Louis Abbey 2021.71

Eero Saarinen and Associates, 1950–1965
Severud-Elstad-Krueger Associates, founded 1928

Arch Interior Framing 410.00′ to 630.00′ (Job No. 5802, Sheet No. S118), 1961
diazotype

Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library 2021.197

These two construction drawings for St. Louis mid-century icons represent collaborations among architects, engineers, and contractors. On the left, the deep V-shaped elements in the construction drawing for Gyo Obata’s Saint Louis Priory Church are one of the building’s most technologically radical aspects. To support its swooping arches, the engineers designed a system of steel shells, which were sprayed with concrete—an innovation developed by its contractors, the McCarthy Brothers. This structural system gave the building its modernist form, as thousands of tons of concrete and steel combined to create a seemingly weightless structure.

The Gateway Arch drawing at right details the monument’s structural supports and interior stairwells. In 1948, Eero Saarinen’s firm won the competition for its design, based on his conceptual drawings. Over the next decade, Saarinen worked with structural engineering firm Severud-Elstad-Krueger Associates to find a solution that married his conceptual, aesthetic vision with the realities of constructing a 60-story arch—the tallest in the world.

designed by James Buchanan Eads, American, 1820–1887
made by Keystone Bridge Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1865–1901

General Plan of Erecting Ill. & St. Louis Bridge (Eads Bridge), c.1867
ink

Three graceful steel arches are suspended from towers in this elevation drawing. A collaboration between engineer James Eads and builder Keystone Bridge Company, it offers a fascinating look at the innovative design that enabled the Eads Bridge to cross the Mississippi River. This drawing details the support cables and temporary wooden towers, colored in red, that Eads devised to hold up the ends of the long arches during construction until they met in the middle. The bridge’s four piers are anchored in bedrock far below the river bottom. The Eads Bridge remains an engineering marvel and architectural gem on the St. Louis riverfront.

American Bridge Collection of Eads Bridge Drawings, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries 2021.198

Art Communities

Many artists in the confluence region desired to create art within the company of like-minded colleagues. The communities they established were grounded in a variety of shared artistic or social beliefs. Some lasted only briefly, while others for a lifetime. Some groups achieved national recognition, while others remained regionally focused. It is easy to overlook regional dynamics when considering nationally known communities or artists. Bringing these groups back into a local context proposes that “the local” and “the national” have a much more interwoven relationship than suggested by a view based solely on individual reputations.

Self-taught artists and others who operated outside established art circles also made works on view in this gallery. The drive to create is powerful, finding an outlet for expression regardless of access to or interest in traditional materials or instruction. Including these artworks offers a broader perspective of how art is produced, encountered, and judged.

The paintings, sculptures, textiles, and other objects displayed here speak effectively for their communities. They also speak across their communities, revealing connections through their shared characteristics of color, movement, material, or subject. These unexpected artistic exchanges provide an important perspective on community and the richness of creative inquiry.

Taxile Doat, French, 1851–1938
made in association with University City Porcelain Works, University City, Missouri, 1912–1914

Gourd Vase, 1913
glazed porcelain

With a rich, semi-matte surface, this vase evokes the rind of a gourd. Before coming to University City, Taxile Doat had earned an international reputation as the highest-paid artist-decorator at the French National Porcelain Factory at Sèvres. While at University City, he pushed the parameters of glazing, adding titanium and carefully controlling the firing to develop this vase’s translucent crystalline glaze. Doat’s exploration of the gourd form was influenced by his admiration for Asian ceramics in organic forms such as fruits, gourds, and vegetables.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Victor Porter Smith and Leeds Art Foundation 1:2017

Adelaide Alsop Robineau, American, 1865–1929
made in association with Art Academy of the American Woman’s League, University City, Missouri, 1909–1911

Scarab Vase (The Apotheosis of the Toiler), 1910
porcelain

Scarab Vase stands as one of the most daunting technical achievements in American ceramics. Its surface ripples with the delicacy of fine lace. Adelaide Robineau spent over 1,000 hours with a tiny, needle- like tool painstakingly incising and scraping away clay to create a surface of stylized beetles and delicate filament patterns. She then applied the glazes by hand.

Though Robineau’s time at University City was short—1909 to 1911—the work she produced met with international acclaim.

Collection Everson Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, 30.4.78a–c 2021.199a–c

attributed to Frederick Hurten Rhead, American (born England), 1880–1942
made in association with Art Academy of the American Woman’s League, University City, Missouri, 1909–1911

Vase, c.1911
glazed earthenware

Graceful tree trunks branch into a web of delicate boughs. Such design exemplifies the ideals of both the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles, early 20th-century movements that emphasized natural forms. The rich matte tones of blue are contrasted by the terra cotta tone of the clay that is revealed in the incised outlines.

Frederick Rhead came from a long line of pottery workers in Staffordshire, England. He immigrated to the United States in 1902, eventually coming to University City in 1909.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Norman Family in loving memory of Isaac and Elva Norman 64:2001

Ste. Genevieve Art Colony

Inspired by summer art colonies in the eastern United States but constrained by the Great Depression of the 1930s, St. Louis artists looked for a nearby location for summer painting. In 1932, painters Bernard Peters, Aimee Schweig, and Jessie Rickly found an ideal spot along the Mississippi River 60 miles to the south at Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Others soon followed, establishing a dynamic summer art school in 1934.

Though the colony’s artists created paintings in a wide variety of styles, they shared a somewhat utopian spirit as well as a belief in reformist politics. Women artists found greater social and artistic freedom in the colony, known for its informal, collaborative environment. Interest waned over time, and the nation’s entry into World War II in 1941 closed the school’s doors.

Miriam McKinnie,
American, 1906–1987

Gathering Greens, c.1937
oil on canvas

Three women kneel to gather greens into a bucket. The viewer is situated as one of them, equally low to the ground, participating in their communal efforts. This low perspective and the depiction of solid, three-dimensional forms were favored by many artists in the 1930s and endowed monumentality to everyday laborers.

It is likely that these women are scavenging for edible greens, such as dandelions or wild onion, found in open fields or along roadways. During the Great Depression (1929–1939), many families relied on foraging to fill out a dinner thin on substance.

Private Collection, Illinois 2021.200

Bernard Peters,
American, 1893–1949

Landscape, c.1930
oil on canvas

Thickly applied layers of richly pigmented paint evoke the heady intensity of a summer day in the Missouri Ozark hills. Bernard Peters was one of the founders of the Ste. Genevieve Art Colony. However, his love of quietude and privacy drew him 10 miles away from Ste. Genevieve into the countryside to settle into a dwelling that his fellow artists fondly referred to as the Old Home Place.

The John & Susan Horseman Collection 2021.6

Aimee Schweig,
American, 1891–1987

Lime Works in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 1936
oil on Masonite panel

Smoke furiously billows from a vertical kiln on the right. A crusher plant stands to the left, and loaded railroad cars wait in the front. Simplified planes, cool tones, and clean lines convey the precisionism favored by American artists drawn to the nation’s modern technology and industrial landscapes.

Lime production was the Ste. Genevieve area’s largest industry. A 1938 lime-worker strike brought hardship and strife throughout the community. The artist colony never fully recovered its footing before it closed when the country entered World War II in 1941.

Collection of GFWC Woman’s Club of Ste. Genevieve 2021.91

New Deal Art Projects

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal began a series of nationwide programs to provide aid to artists affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Missouri office of the Federal Art Project (FAP) opened in 1938. This program placed artists to work on the Index of American Design, which documented important objects by early American craftspeople. The Easel Division of the FAP provided a weekly stipend for artists working in a variety of media.

Photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration recorded both the profound deprivations experienced by the country’s rural populations and the program’s role in improving their conditions. As the first federally supported program for the arts, the FAP had a lasting impact on the development of 20th-century American art.

Dolores Adelaide Haupt,
American, 1915–2001

Knit Beaded Bag, 1941
watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paperboard

Every single bead, frayed thread, ribbon, gap, or tear on this bag has been meticulously depicted. Dolores Haupt was one of seven artists in the St. Louis region who worked on the Federal Art Project’s Index of American Design to replicate selected antique objects important to American cultural history.

The tapestry-like beadwork of pastoral scenes and ora made such bags popular with mid-19th-century women. Sarah Trost Taylor, grandmother of St. Louis resident Antoinette Pierson Taylor, made the one depicted here.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Index of American Design, 1943 2021.201

Arthur Rothstein,
American, 1915–1985

Evicted Sharecropper Boy, New Madrid County, Missouri, 1939, printed 1981
gelatin silver print

A young boy, his eyes shielded by his hat, sits amidst his family’s scattered possessions alongside Highways 60 and 61 near Sikeston, Missouri. For five days in January 1939, over 1,500 evicted sharecroppers staged a demonstration. Their goal was to bring attention to their continued economic struggles following a devastating 1937 flood.

Arthur Rothstein, working for the Farm Security Administration, took this photograph to show the destitution. Such images shocked the nation and President and Mrs. Roosevelt into responding.

Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Hunter 2021.67

Joseph Paul Vorst,
American (born Germany), 1897–1947

After the Flood, c.1940
oil on board

A mother has wrapped her baby tight against the biting cold of a ravaged and icy landscape. The family is among the 1 million people left homeless by the 1937 Mississippi Valley flood, which inundated 27,000 square miles over 12 states.

German-born artist Joseph Vorst received support from the Federal Art Project’s easel program. Vorst’s work often focused on the hardships that the era’s natural disasters—its floods, dust storms, and tornadoes—pressed upon the country’s most vulnerable.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2007.220 2021.156

The People’s Art Center

While supporting individual artists, the New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP) also created more than100 community art centers across the nation. The centers provided paid staff positions, exhibitions, and free art classes to adults and children. These activities were central to the goal of the FAP to place arts into the lives of everyday Americans.

The People’s Art Center in St. Louis was founded in 1942 under the FAP program. Remarkable as the first interracial art center while much of the city was segregated, it offered African American artists opportunities to study and exhibit. This visibility often led to inclusion in juried shows sponsored by the Urban League and the Saint Louis Art Museum. When the FAP ended in 1943, the center continued to operate with private donations until 1967.

Spencer Thornton Banks,
American, 1912–1983

Drawing from Adult Sketch Class, People’s Art Center, 1947
red and black chalk

Quick marks, effectively translating this young model’s form, are balanced with a sensitive evocation of his emotional presence. Spencer Banks had a career in commercial art, and in 1939, the St. Louis Argus ran his short-lived comic strip “Pokenia,” one of the first to feature an African American female lead. Even so, when the People’s Art Center opened in 1942, Banks signed up for the very first adult class. Continuing his instruction for nearly a decade, he garnered prizes in almost every local exhibition then available to African Americans in the St. Louis area.

George B. Vashon Museum 2021.4

Houston Chandler,
American, 1914–2015

Gorilla, c.1946
wood

Muscular limbs compressed into a tight pose convey this gorilla’s physical power. The sophisticated incorporation of wood grain and reductive form attest to Houston Chandler’s artistic skill.

Chandler taught sculpture and etching at the People’s Art Center. Having been the second African American to receive an MFA from the University of Iowa, he was one of the most highly trained instructors there. He also taught art at Vashon High School and coached numerous championship track and football teams in the area. Gorilla testifies to the level of artistry among the center’s staff.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 1124:2010

Frederick Cornelius Alston,
American, 1894–1987

The Good Book Says, c.1929
oil on canvas

Three men gather together, searching through the Bible. The composition’s mottled earth tones maintain a compelling balance of figuration and abstraction. The artist Frederick Alston, the St. Louis American’s first art director and cartoonist, was a long-time instructor at the People’s Art Center and Booker T. Washington Technical High School.

Throughout his association with the center, Alston maintained a national reputation. As early as 1929, The Good Book Says was included in the Harmon Foundation’s ground-breaking exhibition Paintings by American Negro Artists, which opened at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD 2021.202

Black Artists’ Group

Within the nation’s political turmoil of the 1960s, African American collectives formed to envision and enact a self-determined Black identity. Established in 1968, the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) in St. Louis was one of the nation’s most interdisciplinary. Its goal was to change “our people’s frame of reference from white to Black.” BAG’s creative output merged an exploration of African art and thought with the European avant-garde and local neighborhoods’ immediate economic and educational concerns. The group brought multimedia performances directly to residents on sidewalks and in community buildings.

BAG expanded in 1969, adding artist residencies in music, theater, dance, film, and visual art. Until it disbanded three years later, it offered free classes, temporarily filling the gap left by the closure of the People’s Art Center in 1967.

In-gallery music recording by: Luther Thomas and The Human Arts Ensemble, St. Louis, 1971–1977; performed by The Saint Louis, Missouri Creative Ensemble; written by Lester Bowie, American, 1941–1999, and Luther Thomas, American, 1950–2009; published by Atavistic Records; recorded at Berea Presbyterian Church, St. Louis; Funky Donkey Vols. I & II, 1973, published 2001; © Atavistic Records. With thanks to Damon Smith

Manuel Hughes,
American, born 1938

Untitled, 1971
oil on canvas

Machinery and human form merge to offer a potent exploration of sexuality. Much of Manuel Hughes’ work contested damaging stereotypes while celebrating Black culture. As he explained, “Everyone was focused on the political struggle during the late 1960s and early 70s….I was doing Black imagery to reinforce what Black people were feeling at that time.”

Curious from walking past the People’s Art Center on his way to school as a child, Hughes enrolled himself in a class. Later, several musician friends introduced him to BAG.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift in memory of Saul A. and Dorothy Pearlstein Dubinsky from their children 616:1998

Emilio Cruz,
American, 1938–2004

Untitled, 1972
acrylic on canvas

A band of black-and-white patterns melds geometric abstraction with generalized African shield and mask forms. These two interests express the merging of European avant-garde and African art at the heart of BAG.

Emilio Cruz, a New York Afro-Cuban artist, came to St. Louis in 1969 as BAG’s visual artist-in-residence. He participated in the group’s performances and taught at its center and in the nearby Pruitt-Igoe housing project. He also led college workshops and neighborhood art projects, embracing the opportunity to “work with Black people [on] our own way of saying things.”

The John & Susan Horseman Collection 2021.7

Oliver Lee Jackson,
American, born 1935

Painting II, 1969, 1969
oil-based pigments and mixed media on canvas

A striking, red mask looks out over scattered disembodied figures and a box depicted in both illusionistic and at, abstract forms. These motifs question conventions of Western painting.

Oliver Jackson brought Pan-African concepts to his collaborations with BAG. He developed his ideas while teaching in Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education program (EHE). Partnered with dancer Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis, EHE was an incubator for the emerging field of Black studies. Jackson’s Images: Sons/Ancestors, held in 1971 at Powell Hall, was a multimedia, Pan-African “concert-ritual prayer” that challenged the exclusion of African-centered art from such traditional venues.

Courtesy of the artist 2021.12

Charlie Logan,
American, 1893–1984

Man’s “Diamond Sis” Coat, Bag, Hat, and Cane, 1978–84
various fabrics covered with yarn and thread embroidery trimmed with buttons, coins, tassels, American flags, metal, rhinestones, and wood wrapped with plain weave cotton and wool crepe, embroidered and wrapped with yarn and thread with pennies and buttons

Multiple layers of stitching, appliquéd fabrics, buttons, and other small objects embellish a man’s jacket and accessories. Charlie Logan, who lived in Alton, Illinois, used thread from unraveled socks and other textiles to create intricate, embroidered designs. He included shapes, letters, and numbers with personal meanings, like the anagram of his birth date sewn on the jacket pockets. His expressive, colorful garments, which he wore daily, suggest a familiarity with African-derived folk aesthetics.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and partial gift of Kate and Ken Anderson, 1998 2021.203.1, 2021.203.2, 2021.203.3, 2021.203.4

Julius Hasenritter,
American, 1869–1923

Statue of Liberty Cabinet, 1886–90
wood cutouts and paint on wood

With intricate, scrolled cutouts, filigree designs, and marquetry surfaces, this cabinet is a woodworking showpiece. In celebration of the then recently dedicated Statue of Liberty—which tops the cabinet—fairies, trumpeters, dancers, musicians, stars, and garlanded mandolins combine in an exuberant and patriotic display. Dangling pendants and green olive leaf legs add to the abundance of details.

Julius Hasenritter was born in Hermann, Missouri, to a German-immigrant family and later worked as a jeweler. He transferred his skills in intricate work to wood carving to create this elaborately embellished cabinet.

Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York, Gift of the Hirschhorn Foundation, 1997.6.2 2021.154

Self-Taught Artists

Most artists represented in this gallery worked within creative communities that provided support and camaraderie. In addition, many received academic or professional training in fine arts. An artistic person’s compulsion to create, however, is irrepressible regardless of access to or interest in such company or instruction. Self-taught artists transformed whatever materials were at hand into objects of art.

In the 1930s and 1960s, the desire to situate art into the lives of everyday people encouraged the recognition of a broader context in which art is produced and encountered. It also prompted a reappraisal of the parameters by which fine art is judged. The self-taught artists presented here offer a more inclusive appreciation of the genius of artistic vision found within the confluence region.

Fred E. Myers,
American, 1910–1950

Lincoln, 1929
wood (railroad tie)

Abraham Lincoln grasps his tie, his coat casually open. Fred Myers, a coal miner by trade, carved Lincoln from
a railroad tie taken from a mine. Myers captured Lincoln’s distinctive features with sensitivity to the wood’s natural grain. Unable to afford sandpaper, the artist used a glass shard to polish the surface to a high sheen.

Although not professionally trained, Myers used his talents at Southern Illinois University Carbondale to carve figures for the museum’s exhibits as part of a WPA-funded project.

University Museum, Southern Illinois University Carbondale 2021.39

Frederick “Fritz” Baurichter,
American (born Germany), 1850–1937

Hummingbird, c.1904–10
Rooster, c.1904–10
painted wood

These whimsically carved and painted sculptures capture their subjects in lively poses. The hummingbird alights on a wood base, with raised wings and long beak exploring a flower. The rooster stands erect with long tailfeathers and curled tongue, crowing through his open beak.

German immigrant Fritz Baurichter had experience carving as a gunsmith and was inspired by a visit to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair to try his hand at sculpture. The folk artist created small works as gifts, carving each with charm and a sophisticated sense of design.

Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis 2021.51, 2021.50

St. Louis Modernism and Max Beckmann

Modernism can take many visual directions: exuberant colors, pared-down palettes, organic forms, or hard-edged geometries. A very particular engagement with modernism developed in St. Louis during the short stay of German artist Max Beckmann from 1947 to 1949.

Beckmann came to Washington University in St. Louis to replace art instructor Philip Guston, who was on sabbatical. Beckmann was already known to the local art world. In the 1930s, Guston had seen Beckmann’s paintings condemning the ravages of World War I (1914–1918). Perry Rathbone, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, had met Beckmann and encouraged the university’s invitation. The creative circle that soon gathered around the German artist readily absorbed his angular, elongated forms, compressed space, and, especially, his searing engagement with political and social issues.

Max Beckmann,
German, 1884–1950

The Dream, 1921
oil on canvas

A young girl, a blind beggar, two amputees, and a delirious woman all crowd uncomfortably on an upturned floor. The man climbing the ladder holds a fish, which for Max Beckmann symbolized the human soul. The ceiling blocks his ascent, however, thwarting redemption or escape from this senselessness. Works like this responded to the carnage of World War I (1914–1918) and demonstrated Beckmann’s cynicism toward post-war Germany.

The artist’s style deeply influenced regional artists. St. Louis was equally invigorating to Beckmann, who found a strong group of supporters and patrons, an active social circle, and a growing national reputation during his time in the city.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 841:1983

Philip Guston,
American (born Canada), 1913–1980

Performers, 1947
oil on canvas

Four young musicians, painted in acidic tones, are crowded between a flat background and a ragged barrier of wood scraps and rope. Philip Guston and the German artist Max Beckmann shared a number of social concerns and artistic interests, expressed in a tense compression of space.

Like Beckmann’s The Dream, also on this wall, Performers is an anguished response to war. These melancholic and sharply angular figures, confined behind makeshift bars, evoke the many images of the Holocaust (1933–1945) that came into the United States and the anxiety they produced.

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1950 (50.32) 2021.193

Fred Conway,
American, 1900–1973

Grand and Olive—St. Louis, 1946
oil on Masonite

Neon signs, traffic, pedestrian crowds, and other aspects of urban street life collide here, as if viewed through a kaleidoscope. This painting draws on the fractured angles and colors of Synthetic Cubism to evoke what was one of St. Louis’ busiest intersections in the present-day Grand Center Arts District.

During Max Beckmann’s time at Washington University in St. Louis, he grew especially close to his colleague Fred Conway, whose work he admired. This particular painting was made for the Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney department store, which commissioned a group of artists to depict scenes of Missouri.

Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Gift of Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney, Inc., 2014.40 2021.104

Stephen Greene,
American, 1917–1999

The Deposition, 1947
oil on canvas

Anguished mourners remove the lifeless body of Jesus from the cross. They are not biblical subjects, however, but unknown, ordinary people.

In 1946, Stephen Greene joined his former instructor, Philip Guston, on the Washington University in St. Louis faculty. They discussed the news and images coming out after World War II (1939–1945) and “how to allegorize it.” Greene produced a series of paintings using the life of Jesus as a potent symbol of the era’s tragedy, grief, and anxiety. Greene’s figures are entangled in ladders that recall the cage-like barbed wire frequently seen in Holocaust images.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer Jr. 529:1957

Art as Advocate

Many events central to the history of the United States occurred in the confluence region. St. Louis is among America’s cities whose residents have advocated most fiercely for social and political change. Some of the area’s pivotal events have national significance, such as the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the 1847 initial decision in the Dred and Harriet Scott case.

The region also saw the Civil War’s first general emancipation in 1861,
the nation’s first general strike in 1877, and some of the most radical labor politics and demonstrations in the 1930s. More recent activism has addressed the continued destructive inequities of racism, including turbulent clashes in Cairo, Illinois, in the 1960s and the intensification of the Black Lives Matter movement following the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri.

Artworks in this section advocate by drawing attention to politics, people, and places. Some have communicated support for political policies or promoted recognition of people from marginalized groups. Others have countered social injustices or investigated relationships between humans and nature. All speak boldly in the hope of effecting change.

George Caleb Bingham,
American, 1811–1879

Raftsmen Playing Cards, 1847
oil on canvas

Dangers lurk in the background of this idyllic river scene. A sandbar lies menacingly to the left, and a snag, or fallen tree, punctures the river’s surface to the right. Both features were capable of wrecking rafts and steamboats alike, serious impediments to the future of commerce on both the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. As an artist and politician, George Caleb Bingham often used his paintings to lobby on behalf of investment in his home state of Missouri. Raftsmen Playing Cards advocated for the cleanup
of these rivers with federal funds.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Ezra H. Linley by exchange 50:1934

Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin,
French, 1770–1852

Osage Warrior, 1806–1807
watercolor and graphite

A headdress made from a vulture’s beak and hummingbird skins and a silver armband engraved with the Great Seal of the United States convey this Osage man’s status. Though his name is not documented in association with this drawing, his portrait was created when he visited Washington, DC, as part of a delegation from the Osage Nation. The group traveled from St. Louis to negotiate a treaty of alliance.

The artist did not make this portrait to advocate for the rights of the Osage Nation, which were repeatedly undermined by the United States government and its citizens. Yet it forcefully asserts the personhood of its subject, demanding that viewers pay attention to him, his community, and his story.

Winterthur Museum, Museum Purchase 2021.204

John Rogers,
American, 1829–1904

The Slave Auction, 1859
painted plaster

A family is about to be torn apart in a tragic outcome of chattel slavery. The auctioneer’s hair curls into devil horns, revealing his evil character. The conuence region in Missouri held many such auctions as part of a national slave-trading network.

This tabletop sculpture, an icon of the abolitionist cause, followed artist John Rogers’ 18-month residence in Hannibal, Missouri. As he wrote about his only experience living in a slave state, “the curse of slavery is dreadfully apparent here… I am not much of a politician… But I begin to see how things really are now.”

Albany Institute of History & Art, gift of Mrs. Ledyard Cogswell, Jr., from the Benjamin Walworth Arnold Collection 2021.205

Lewis W. Hine,
American, 1874–1940

Newsies at Skeeter Branch, St. Louis, Missouri, 11:00am, 1910
gelatin silver print

Three newsies, or newspaper boys, pose with a confident swagger for the camera. Photographer Lewis W. Hine encountered them in a place known as Skeeter’s Branch, at Jefferson Avenue and present-day Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, just northwest of Union Station. Hine was traveling around the country on a mission to document scenes of child labor for the National Child Labor Committee.

Declaring that he “wanted to show things that had to be corrected,” the artist tightly framed his photographs to bring viewers into an intimate, humanizing encounter, as seen here. His pioneering work led directly to federal legislation prohibiting child labor, passed in 1916.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by Charles and Ruth Levy Foundation, 1974.216 2021.169

Joe Jones,
American, 1909–1963

We Demand, 1934
oil on Masonite

Labor protesters march under elevated railroad tracks in downtown St. Louis. The leader carries a sign demanding the passage of H.R. 7598, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill. Four African American figures lead the demonstration here, reecting artist Joe Jones’ recognition of the central role African American protestors played in St. Louis’ radical politics of the early 1930s.

Jones ardently believed that art had the power to affect social policy and, consequently, used his paintings to express his positions on labor and racial equality. As he remarked, “I want to paint things that knock holes in the walls.”

Loan courtesy of The Butler Institute of American Art, Gift of Sidney Freedman 1948 2021.3

Daniel R. Fitzpatrick,
American, 1891–1969

Again, 1918
ink

A giant hand releases a mass of human figures, who tumble into a pile alongside a row of crosses. With its stark yet poignant title, Again expresses the nation’s fatigue and dismay as the United States entered its second year of military action in World War I (1914–1918).

This work is the original drawing for an editorial cartoon published on July 16, 1918, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As the newspaper’s nationally syndicated cartoonist for more than 45 years and winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, Daniel Fitzpatrick offered critiques of political news in a few bold strokes.

Art Collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Center for Missouri Studies, Columbia 2021.16

Jennifer Colten,
American, born 1962

Mound 7040, Mound 2484, and Mound 7158, from the project Significant and Insignificant Mounds, 2017–18
archival pigment prints

Three mounds dominate these photographs. St. Louis was once nicknamed Mound City for the numerous ancient Mississippian earthworks that dotted its landscape. The priorities of urban and industrial development resulted in the demolition of most of these mounds. For instance, construction for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair razed those that were located where this Museum now stands.

In the last century, landfills and slag heaps have become mounds of modern times. In an ongoing project, photographer Jennifer Colten and writer Jesse Vogler pair historic texts with contemporary photographs, bringing these ancient and contemporary landscapes into dialogue. They ask us to question how individuals and communities have defined human interventions into the landscape as either “significant” or “insignificant,” and what these judgments reveal about the cultures that made them.

Courtesy of the artist 2021.99, 2021.101, 2021.100

“I crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis, and after passing through the wood which borders the river…entered an extensive open plain. In 15 minutes, I found myself in the midst of a group of mounds, mostly of a circular shape, and at a distance, resembling enormous haystacks scattered through a meadow…. Around me, I counted forty-five mounds, or pyramids, besides a great number of small artificial elevations; these mounds form something more than a semicircle, about a mile in extent, the open space on the river.”

—Henry Marie Brackenridge, 1811

from top to bottom:

Emmet Gowin,
American, born 1941

The Abandoned and Condemned Village of Times Beach, Missouri, 1989
gelatin silver print

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Edith and Emmet Gowin in honor of Eric Lutz 26:2021

Sam Fentress,
American, born 1955

Times Beach, Missouri, 1986, printed 2020
gelatin silver print

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Sam and Betsy Fentress 59:2021

Located southwest of St. Louis along the Meramec River, the town of Times Beach, Missouri, suffered one of the nation’s largest environmental disasters. It became an EPA Superfund site after a contractor sprayed the town’s roads with the toxic chemical dioxin to suppress dust.

In Emmet Gowin’s aerial photograph, lush foliage and a grid of streets betray no trace of the chemicals lurking below. Following the town’s evacuation in 1982, the land is returning to nature. The photograph exemplifies Gowin’s astonishment that, “in spite of all we have done, the earth still offers back so much beauty,
so much sustenance.” Sam Fentress’ photograph records the pallets left behind. It is part of a project examining the placement of Christian signs in the landscape. The billboard’s biblical verse references baptism, a ritual of purification by water—a pointed juxtaposition for a place so contaminated by liquids.

from left to right:

Mel Watkin,
American, born 1954

Sprawl: Spore, 2006
pen and acrylic on St. Louis road map

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg 675:2018

Sprawl: The Score, 2007
pen and acrylic on Illinois road map

Collection of the Illinois State Museum, 2011.96 Gift of the artist, 2021.188

In the Sprawl series, Mel Watkin embellished road maps to draw attention to issues of social and environmental well-being. A map of the St. Louis metropolitan area is seemingly overrun by multicolored colonies of vegetal and fungal growth that combat urban sprawl. Orange and green fungal-shaped forms representing cities and forests wage battle across the Illinois map. Inspired by the flora and fauna around her home in southwestern Illinois, Watkin’s drawings act as reminders that, as she describes, “nature can rear up and assert its control over our lives without a moment’s notice.”

Ken Light,
American, born 1951

Race Wall, St. Louis, Missouri, 1971, printed 1999
gelatin silver print

Two men sit among painted portraits of Black leaders. This photograph documents one of St. Louis’ most important community-based art projects: a three-story mural created in 1968 by volunteers from local civil rights groups. This “Wall of Respect” was part of a national urban mural movement celebrating African American achievement.

A hub for Black activism, concerts, and rallies, the mural also became a target for vandalism, such as the white paint that partially defaces several portraits. Despite these acts, the mural held a central place in its community for over a decade, before its building was demolished in the 1980s.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of August A. Busch Jr., by exchange 39:2021

Damon Davis,
American, born 1985

All Hands On Deck #5, 2015
lithograph

published by Wildwood Press, St. Louis, Missouri

What do hands and their gestures reveal? In 2014, a police officer fatally shot the African American teenager Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking protest movements. Damon Davis photographed hands of protestors posed in a gesture referencing the phrase “hands up, don’t shoot.” By titling his project All Hands On Deck, the artist transformed this gesture of surrender into a call for change through shared responsibility. Davis pasted enlarged prints of his photographs on Ferguson buildings to “raise hope and show solidarity. This is a problem that is going to take everyone to fix.”

This lithograph is one of seven Davis made after his photographs. The six additional prints are on view in Gallery 212S in the Museum’s East Building.

Saint Louis Art Museum, The Sidney S. and Sadie Cohen Print Purchase Fund 9:2016.5

Tom Huck,
American, born 1971

The Crossing Guard, from the portfolio 2 Weeks in August: 14 Rural Absurdities, 1997, printed 2000
woodcut

A local jail escapee, wearing stolen religious garments, directs morning traffic. Artist Tom Huck memorialized such local legends from his hometown, Potosi, Missouri. As he explained, “that place is loaded with bizarre tales and local folklore, as most small towns are…. Every town big and small has that stuff. Some of us just might look a little harder than others.”

Through Huck’s relentless, frenetically carved lines, the people who populate his prints become, if not exactly heroes, then at least epic characters around whom a community could rally.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Elliot Smith in memory of Shyrle Jocelyn Waldman 57:2000.15

Tom Huck,
American, born 1971

Playland: The Great Sharkburger Shortage of ’95, from the portfolio 2 Weeks in August: 14 Rural Absurdities, 1996, printed 2000
woodcut

Mayhem has broken out in the parking lot of the fictional restaurant Sharkburger. This scene lampoons the chaos that ensued when the first McDonald’s in Potosi, Missouri, ran out of hamburgers on its opening day.

Tom Huck creates dark rural satires that chronicle his hometown’s lore. He uses visual language inspired by his artistic predecessors, from the innovative woodcuts of 15th-century northern Europe to the social satire of 20th-century German prints. Huck points out the foibles of his community but also celebrates its distinctive character.

Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Elliot Smith in memory of Shyrle Jocelyn Waldman 57:2000.14

Anna Pottery, Anna, Illinois,
1859–1910

Snake Jug, c.1865
stoneware with painted decoration

Snakes writhe, insects scuttle, and men rush about in a frenzy. Brothers Wallace and Cornwall Kirkpatrick of Anna Pottery made this jug to communicate their political beliefs during the Civil War (1861–1865). The man dressed in woman’s clothing is Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, who allegedly disguised himself in this manner to escape arrest. Five copperhead snakes attack a Union soldier. “Copperhead” also identified Northern sympathizers with the Confederate cause, who made up a large percentage of the population in Anna, Illinois. The Kirkpatricks, however, were Radical Republicans— the ultra-liberal progressives of their day.

Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Walter C. and Mary C. Briggs Endowment Fund, gift of funds from Mrs. Eunice Dwan, The Fred R. Salisbury II Fund, and The Decorative Arts Deaccession Fund 2021.66