Acquisitions:

Francis Martin Drexel
American, born in Austria, 1792–1863

PORTRAIT OF TWO YOUTHS, 1822
Oil on canvas
Purchase, Charles Knox Smith Fund, 2005

Tyrolean-born Francis Martin Drexel immigrated to Philadelphia, America’s cultural capital of that time, in the summer of 1817 with a rudimentary formal training in art, no knowledge of English, and an ambition to forge a career painting portraits. Within a year he was submitting works to the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then in its thirteenth year of existence. “I continued to do middle well,” he later recalled of this period, and this double portrait gives evidence of that success. Drexel’s talents fit an advantageous niche in the art world of Philadelphia, a step just below the exalted and expensive portraits the upper class would commission from the Peale family or Thomas Sully, and a step well above the work of itinerant painters. In largely middle-class Pennsylvania, his potential pool of clients could be very sizable.

This painting, too, to judge by its quality and prominent signature, was surely singled out by the artist for a special effort, as a demonstration of his abilities that would attract further commissions from any who would see it. The portrait is at once formal, in the sitters’ attire, and graciously accessible, in their warm and casual pose. The sitters are adolescents, an age that is signified by the toy hoop the boy holds. In every other respect, however, they are presented as if they were fashionable young adults. The impulse to let children be children – and to represent them as such in paintings – would not gain wide currency until later in the century.

Despite Drexel’s success as a painter, he was at heart an adventurer, and in the 1830s he would seek more lucrative careers as a brewer, a merchant, and eventually a banker specializing in foreign exchange. With the fortune the family amassed through their banking venture, the artist’s son Anthony Joseph Drexel would found the university that bears their name. His granddaughter Catherine, Anthony’s niece, would pursue the charitable missions to impoverished Native American and African American communities that would earn her sainthood in 2000.

Charles Sheeler
American, 1883-1965

VERMONT LANDSCAPE, 1924
Oil on canvas
Purchase, Charles Knox Smith Fund, 2004

Born in Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler studied applied design at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On a 1908–1909 visit to Europe, he encountered works by the modernist avant-garde – Cézanne, Derain, Matisse, and Picasso – and embraced their quest for new ways to represent the world. By the early 1920s, Sheeler had become one of the leaders of the new Precisionist movement in painting that celebrated the clean, spare lines of American vernacular design – rural and industrial architecture, Shaker furniture, functional objects of everyday life – in a graphic simplification of forms redolent of European Cubism.

As a pioneer of modernism in America, though, Sheeler’s path to near-abstraction was not always a straight one. Vermont Landscape was painted in 1924, at the height of his classic Precisionist experiments, yet this work’s picture-postcard subject and more conservative handling suggest an unexpected questioning of the course his art was taking. The Precisionist movement customarily maintained at its core a romantic fascination with the picturesque quaintness of small-town America, whose carefully selected elements were then isolated and reduced to their bare essentials of form. Vermont Landscape extends this relationship to admit the context eschewed in most Sheeler paintings, to accept the risk of nature itself in a collage-like catalogue of the iconic features of a mythic, old-fashioned New England – a white church steeple, a horse and buggy, winding country road, and forested hills. The result is a unique window on Sheeler’s ambitions, an experiment he would not often repeat but one that he prized highly enough to include it in his one-man retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939.

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