Luman Reed

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Luman Reed (Asher Brown Durand)
Luman Reed
Asher Brown Durand , 1835
Oil on canvas
76.50 x 64.50 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Luman Reed (born June 4, 1785 in Austerlitz , Columbia County , New York , † June 6, 1836 in New York City ) was an American entrepreneur and influential art patron .

Life

Reed was born in the town of Green River (now part of the parish of Austerlitz) in New York State to the farmer Eliakim Reed II and his wife Rebecca Fitch. The couple were originally from Connecticut and acquired the farm in 1779. Sometime between 1787 and 1792 the family moved to the village of Coxsackie, about 30 kilometers away on the Hudson River , where Reed attended school.

Meanwhile, his father and uncle Roswell Reed opened a grocery store primarily focused on agricultural products . It was there that Luman began his professional life when he worked as a simple shop assistant in the afternoons after school. When his father sold the business to Ralph Barker in 1804, Luman remained his employee and trainee for four years. However, the limited space and limited employment opportunities eventually led him to look for new challenges in 1808. First he hired Shakespeare on the shop-owned merchant sloop , which traveled up and down the Hudson River. Around 1812 he came back to his uncle Roswell, who now ran his own grocery store in Coxsackie, and became his employee.

In 1815 they both moved to New York City and opened a clothing wholesaler at Coenties Slip on the southern tip of Lower Manhattan . In 1821 the company moved to Front Street near Wall Street and Roswell Reed left the business a year later. Luman subsequently worked with different partners: David Lee (1822–1827), Charles Y. Hempsted (1827–1829) and Jonathan Sturges (from 1828). Thanks to the company, he came to great fortune. This enabled him to retire in 1832.

"He had made a reputation for being a completely honest but very astute trader, an exacting employer who was trusted and loved by those who worked for him, and a modest and intelligent man."

- Russell Lynes in The Tastemakers , 1954

“He did good with his money; he made it easily, and he spent it freely. He was a benefactor of the city. "

- Joseph Alfred Scoville in The old merchants of New York City , 1864

Luman Reed was married to Mary Barker (* 1780; † 1869) - the sister of his former boss - since 1808; the couple had three children together with Catherine, Charles and Mary. The family moved within New York City several times. First she lived on Bridge Street, then in Coenties Slip, later on Stone Street and finally on Greenwich Street. Luman Reed has always been described as a calm, level-headed and music-loving family man. At the age of only 51, he died unexpectedly in 1836 after a brief, serious illness and was buried in the New York Marble Cemetery in Manhattan .

Art funding

Reed was an extraordinary art lover, and from the early 1830s onwards he distinguished himself as a critical promoter and financier of numerous, established and young, aspiring painters. For example, he supported Thomas Cole , Asher Brown Durand , William Sidney Mount , Samuel FB Morse and George Whiting Flagg - and was sometimes close friends with them. He had a particular interest in landscape and portrait painting , but he also collected works of genre painting with equal attention . In 1834 Luman Reed was elected an Honorary NA of the National Academy of Design .

In his quest to establish a national artistic culture that could be compared to the highly developed one in Europe, and due to the lack of museums and galleries in the city, he decided to use the fortune he had acquired to put together a high-quality art collection and to make them available to the public. On the third floor of his townhouse on Greenwich Street, he then set up a two-room gallery that was open to everyone one day a week. The meetings of the Sketch Club had already taken place there since 1829, from which the Gentlemen's Club Century Association later formed. Leading artists, writers and collectors came together in the roundtables and discussed current affairs and intellectual problems in art. Reed financed Durand the production of a series of paintings by the first seven Presidents of the United States , which should quickly give his young collection a historically relevant claim. At the same time, he also had a pièce de résistance - an outstanding major work - in mind for his collection. Cole provided this with his cycle The Course of Empire , the completion of which Reed did not live to see. Durand reminded Cole in a letter after Reed's death

"The man whose equal we shall never see again."
"The man whose soon we will probably never see anyone again."

The collection remained in the possession of the Reed family until 1844, when it was acquired by a group of his former partners and investors, who then founded the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts to preserve the pictures permanently. When this had to be closed 14 years later for financial reasons, the paintings were donated to the New York Historical Society , among others .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph Alfred Scoville: The old merchants of New York City . Third Edition, John W. Lovell Company, 1885, New York City, 44.
  2. List of members of the National Academy of Design ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved from nationalacademy.org on February 20, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
  3. John Caldwell, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, Dale T. Johnson: American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume I . Princeton University Press , New York City, 1994, 413.

literature

  • Ella M. Foshay: Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery . Harry N. Abrams, New York City 1990