Painting: Down from the Attic

Two of the all-but-forgotten names of American art are William Sidney Mount and Richard Caton Woodville. Both were Easterners—Mount from Long Island, Woodville from Baltimore —both enjoyed a measure of fame for their lusty colloquial vignettes of the U.S. in the mid-1800s, and both have been largely ignored in the century since. Now, as art historians rummage around to reconstruct the country’s long-neglected artistic heritage, the two are getting a new and appreciative audience (see color page).

This spring Washington’s Corcoran Gallery put on the first exhibition of Woodville’s work to appear since his death in 1855, next week sends the show off to Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, and from there to Utica, N.Y., Atlanta and Brooklyn. Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum is currently showing Mount’s Cider Making, which it recently discovered in Portchester, N.Y., and bought for its collection. Even the White House is interested, has included Mount and Woodville on a list of 22 U.S. artists that it would like to add to its own collection.

Warm and Crackling. Both men painted in the “Mad ’40s,” an era that was ushered in with the cry of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” and went out with the California gold rush. Americans gambled their fortunes on cockfights, sang themselves hoarse at prayer meetings, got roaring drunk on grog. They were titillated by Tyler’s dalliance with a society beauty, captivated by Morse’s telegraph, endlessly amused by politics. Mount and Woodville’s art chronicled the times with a warm blend of sentimentality and good humor.

The scion of a wealthy Baltimore brokerage family, Woodville showed his precocious talent at the tender age of eleven in a small but accomplished watercolor portraying a dying general. Properly educated, he studied anatomy at medical school for a year, then set off to train in Germany when he was 20. There, in Dusseldorf, he learned the romantic lighting and theatrical staging then in vogue, techniques that worked as well on U.S. local color as on Rhine landscapes. Though he lived abroad for most of the brief ten years before he died at 30, his fondest subjects remained the Eastern Shore oyster houses, Chesapeake card games and political fisticuffs back home, and he returned occasionally to refresh his memory. In 1848, when the U.S. was at war with Mexico, he painted his War News from Mexico. From the shirt-sleeved fellow shouting out the story, to the little Negro girl in her everyday dress and the deaf old patriarch in his straight-backed chair, Woodville perfectly captured the sense of awe and thrill of pride surrounding the derring-do down South. Americans apparently thought so too—they bought 14,000 prints of the painting.

Mount, for his part, was purely a Yankee stay-at-home who spent most of his life in the farm country around Stony Brook, Long Island. He was a picturesque figure in a horse-drawn carriage, equipped as a studio with skylight and easel, touring the dirt roads to paint the farmers horse trading, napping, husking corn. He produced scores of paintings before his death in 1868 at 61, and among them was a charming rendition of cider-making time in

October, when all the neighbors gathered to press apples and sample the vintage. Hogs and ducks and dogs all had their role, but center stage went to a pretty barefoot lass—in the words of a folk song Mount undoubtedly knew —”sucking cider through a straw.”