SAMA Collections: American Art

 

Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas, 1870
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
Oil on canvas
Purchased with funds from the Robert J. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation
85.94

Albert Bierstadt is best known for large panoramic landscapes that immortalized the sublime wilderness of the American West - by 1864 he was hailed as the preeminent painter-interpreter of the romantic splendors of the western landscape. By eliminating any reference to human beings, particularly Native Americans, Bierstadt offered his East Coast buyers the sensation of being solitary witnesses to the grandeur of unspoiled nature that seems real to the smallest blade of grass. For American art audiences in the aftermath of the Civil War, Bierstadt's images of awe-inspiring, unspoiled nature offered the promise of national rebirth and expansion.

 

The Museum’s American collection includes many fine landscapes and portraits dating from the Colonial Period to the early Twentieth century. The landscape collection chronicles Americans as masters of the genre scene, with nineteenth and twentieth century examples of the Hudson River School, American Impressionist and Taos School painters.

 

The collection of American art in the San Antonio Museum of Art is, in fact, older than the institution itself, as several key works were at the core of SAMA's parent organization, the San Antonio Museum Association, and its institution the Witte Memorial Museum. Significant early donors included San Antonio art collectors and patrons Dr. Frederic G. and Mrs. Lucille J. Oppenheimer, who gave a group of paintings including portraits by William Dunlap, James Peale, Samuel Lovett Waldo and Ezra Ames as well as landscapes by Thomas Doughty and Jasper Cropsey.

 

Trustee Elizabeth Coates, through the Elizabeth and George Coates Fund, helped acquire Alfred Bricher's Low Tide, Hetherington's Cove, Grand Manan, Robert Henri's El Tango, and Ernest Lawson's High Bridge, Harlem River.

 

Two other trustees who helped increase SAMA's American art holdings were Nancy B. Negley and Gilbert M. Denman, Jr.; their contributions include Robert Julian Onderdonk's East Loyal Field, New York, Alexander Pope's Sportsman's Trophy, Joseph Blackburn's Portrait of Anne Saltonstall, John Singleton Copley's Portrait of a Man in a Blue Coat and Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom with Quakers Carrying Banners.

 

The Lillie and Roy Cullen Endowment Fund allowed for the purchase of John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Mrs. Elliot Fitch Shepard, a magisterial full-length female portrait in striking red-on-red tones, painted by Sargent in 1888. Thanks to the generosity of the Robert J. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, three more important American paintings were added to the collection: Martin Johnson Heade's Passion Flowers with Three Hummingbirds, Albert Bierstadt's Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas and Winslow Homer's Boy Fishing.

 

Significant still-lives include Severin Roesen's Still Life with Sliced Fruit and Lemon and Charles Ethan Porter's Still Life. The acquisition of the Porter also reflects the Museum's interest in collecting the work of African-American artists. Trustee Harriet Kelley and her husband, Dr. Harmon Kelley, are passionate collectors of African-American art and have guided the Museum to the purchase of works such as Edward Mitchell Bannister's painting After the Bath, Jacob Lawrence's casein on paper Bar 'n Grill and Richmond Barthe's bronze sculpture Birth of the Spirituals.

 

 -- From A National Image: The American Painting and Sculpture Collection in the San Antonio Museum of Art