Spaightwood Galleries

Readers of works like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility will remember the delight viewers took and the pride owners possessed at the parks they had enjoyed either by sight or right of ownership. Artists too were not insensible of the desire to tame the wilderness and to find sublimity in the sight of a newly constructed temple as seen from the other side of a lake or pond. Sometimes, clearly, the view was all.

Our selections by artists working in the 19th century includes the ever popular Anonymous, hard at work in a number of different genres and with results varying from work to work. Some are no more than a travel record, others quick sketches from life, others still, ways of thinking about possible ways to lay out a composition, yet still others finished works of art serving not only as a model for another work but as independent, polished pieces capable of standing on their own. Some of these artists are anonymous because they never had any desire to be thought of as artists; others because they hoped that the little they knew about how to draw could serve to help them remember something they wanted to remember but feared that publicly releasing them might bring them unflattering public attention. Others are by professional artists, sometimes continuing a long-time family trade, sometimes immensely successful, sometimes barely known. We have identified works by Hans (Johann) Beckmann, Theophile Chauvel, Heloise Suzanne Colin, William Crotch, Felix O. C. Darley, E. F. Gehme, Otto Greiner, Emil Kinkelin, Johann Mader, Mauer, Lothar Meggendorfer, Adrian Ludwig Richter, Marianne von Rohden, Samuel Prout, and Adalbert Wolfe.