Erastus Salisbury Field
Erastus Salisbury Field (born May 19, 1805 in Leverett , Massachusetts , † June 28, 1900 in Sunderland , Massachusetts) was an American painter and photographer . He learned his artistic skills largely as an autodidact and only received lessons from Samuel FB Morse for a few months . Field is a representative of American folk art and initially worked as a traveling painter, creating portraits of members of the middle class in New England . With the advent of the daguerreotype , he lost a large number of his customers and then worked as a photographer himself. From then on he used the new technique as a template for some of his paintings. From 1860 he painted exotic landscapes, some with biblical motifs. His main work, Historical Monument of the American Republic, is a monumental image of American history. Field is regarded as an exception within American folk art due to his imaginative late work with unusual choice of motifs.
Life
Erastus Salisbury Field was born on May 19, 1805 to a farmer in Leverett, Massachusetts. Early on he showed a talent for drawing portraits. In 1824 he went to New York to take lessons from Samuel FB Morse. After the death of Morse's wife the following year, he dropped out of training and it is unclear to what extent he actually received instruction. No further education is known, so art historians assume that Field largely acquired his artistic skills as a self-taught.
After returning to his home in Leverett, he created his first famous painting, the portrait of grandmother Elizabeth Billings Ashley (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield ) dated 1826 . During this time he began to paint portraits as a traveling painter in western Massachusetts and Connecticut , receiving many of his commissions through the mediation of relatives. In 1831 he married Phebe Gilmore, with whom he lived in Ware from then on . The only child born from this marriage was a daughter born in 1832. In the 1830s Field produced a large number of portraits - some painted within a day - that ensured the family a life of modest prosperity. His qualitatively best portraits were made between 1836 and 1839 when the family lived in Leverett. After the family moved to Ware again for a short time, they settled in New York in 1841. Field stayed there for seven years and repeatedly showed his work in exhibitions.
After the daguerreotype was introduced in the United States in 1839, orders for portrait painters quickly declined. Field then trained himself as a photographer and from 1842 advertised as a daguerreotypist for portraits. The few painted portraits he has made since then are based on previously made photos. From this time onwards, he mainly turned to landscape motifs in his painting. In 1848 he went back to Massachusetts to manage his father's farm.
From 1852 to 1859, the year his wife died, Field lived alternately in Sunderland, Palmer and North Amherst . He then moved with his daughter to Plumtrees, a settlement in Sunderland where the Cooley and Hubbard families lived, with whom Field had been friends since childhood. Field stayed here until the end of his life and set up a simple studio. From 1865 to 1885 in particular, he mainly worked on exotic landscapes with mythological or biblical themes. Some of these works may have been written for the North Amherst Congregational Church , of which Field had been a member since 1853. He also worked on some patriotic motives. His works are based both on his own imagination and on printed illustrations by artists such as the English painters Richard Westall (1765–1836) and John Martin . Field died on June 28, 1900 at the age of 95.
plant
In his early paintings, Field was a typical example of American folk art. He created his portraits for the middle class, for which his works served as souvenir pictures. It was less about special artistic skills, but more about good likeness , i.e. the greatest possible similarity between image and model, whereby the painter may have given the portrayed a flattering likeness . Field always showed the sitters in their Sunday best in a stiff pose. Mostly bust portraits were executed, but occasionally there are also versions as full figures or group portraits. Despite his lack of professional training, Field succeeded in capturing the facial features in great detail and emphasizing the contours. Just as carefully he reproduced details of the clothing - such as lace collars and bonnets - or props such as books, flower baskets and furniture. The correct anatomical representation of the body failed, however, which often makes the head appear as if mounted on the body. The influence of the daguerreotype is clearly evident in his later portraits. The characters appear overall smoother in the representation due to an even more precise execution.
After Field retired to Plumtrees in the 1860s, he, who had never traveled abroad, worked on some exotic motifs, such as his view of the Taj Mahal ( National Gallery of Art ). In addition, a number of biblical motifs such as Death of the First Born ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ) emerged. In this he was referring to the Ten Plagues and the death of the firstborn as proclaimed by Moses. The scene moved Field into a room with Egyptian columns. The architectural details, both in this picture and in the aforementioned Indian subject, were probably taken from contemporary illustrations. Its exotic and biblical motifs are a unique exception in 19th century American folk art. No other American Folk Art artist has developed his own pictorial concept from the repertoire of the known paired with an unreal atmosphere. In pictures like The Garden of Eden ( Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ) he imaginatively showed his own mysterious world of ideas.
Marked by the American Civil War , Field turned to his main work in 1867, the 2.5 × 3.9 meter monumental painting Historical Monument of the American Republic (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield). The work has a prominent position within American folk art due to its comprehensive visionarity and social idealism. Field came up with the idea for this picture while preparing for the 100th anniversary of the United States in 1876. He created an architectural version of initially eight towers in various architectural styles. On the towers he developed 130 relief-like grisaille pictures, historically consecutive from bottom to top, the individual stations of American history from the colonial beginnings to the civil war to the time the picture was created. He also did not ignore negative aspects such as slavery, of which he was a staunch opponent. Seven of the eight spiers are connected by railway bridges on which trains run. This depiction of a utopia was to be shown according to Fields plans at the world exhibition in Philadelphia , where only an engraving by Edward Bierstadt (1824–1906) made after the painting was shown. It was not until 1888 that he finally completed work on this picture by adding two more towers.
Field's paintings fell into disuse for a few decades after his death before collectors and museums discovered the artistic value of American folk art in the 1930s. His work can be found in institutions specializing in folk art such as the Shelburne Museum or the American Folk Art Museum , but also in numerous art museums in the United States. About 300 paintings from his hand are known.
literature
- Salisbury Field, Erastus . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 29 : Rosa – Scheffauer . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1935, p. 381 .
- Mary Black: Erastus Salisbury Field: 1805-1900. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield (Massachusetts) 1984, ISBN 0-916746-06-2 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Field, Erastus Salisbury |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 19, 1805 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Leverett , Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 28, 1900 |
| Place of death | Sunderland , Massachusetts |