War News from Mexico

War News from Mexico
Richard Caton Woodville , 1848
Oil on canvas
68.6 × 63.5 cm
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

War News from Mexico , German war news from Mexico , is the title of a genre painting and main work by the American painter Richard Caton Woodville . The group picture shows residents of a small American town reading a report on the Mexican-American War from a penny leaf . The painting, the content of which is interpreted as a social criticism of the state of the United States , was created in Düsseldorf in 1848 and shows various social and character types as well as their respective perceptions of a political event in the style of the Düsseldorf School of Painting .

Description and meaning

In weathered Antebellum - Portico of a small city hotels called American Hotel , which evidenced by other signs as post office and pub serves and perhaps in the former borderlands of the United States to Mexico is, but could well be located in other parts of the United States, takes a group of Men on war reporting from the Mexican-American War. In this war, the United States endeavored, on the ideological basis of American exceptionalism and the Manifest Destiny Doctrine , which was advocated by US President James K. Polk , to expand its national territory to what was then Mexican territory westward to the Pacific Ocean . This expansionist war goal was achieved with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848.

The reaction of the bourgeois men to the news of the success of the US armed forces, possibly the victory report of the Battle of Chapultepec , covers a certain range. In it the painter alluded to the fact that the war against Mexico in the United States was a thoroughly controversial political issue. A well-known personality who opposed “Mr. Polk's War “ protested with tax refusal and had to go to jail for it, was the American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau . In 1848 Thoreau read the manuscript On Duty to Disobey the State . It was published in 1849 and has been considered a manifesto of civil disobedience ever since .

The painter depicted the recipients of the Groschenblatt with detailed realism: the man with a gray cylinder in the middle of the group of figures, holding the newspaper in front of him and reading aloud from it , opened his eyes in amazement . A facial expression typical for the reception of a sensation is also shown by two men who look over the shoulder of the cylinder bearer into the groschenblatt. The older of them adjusts his glasses with keen interest in order to be able to read the text better; the younger one even waves his hat to express his joy . An apparently hard of hearing old man with a yellow hat, whose knee breeches identify him as a representative of a generation from the time of the American Revolution , receives the news that is spoken in his ear by someone sitting next to him with significantly less enthusiasm . It is believed that this figure is modeled after the painter's great-uncle, Charles Woodville (1763-1845), the cotton merchant, geologist, and namesake of the city of Catonsville , who married a daughter of Charles Carroll , one of the founding fathers of the United States , in 1787 .

Richard Caton Woodville , self-portrait, 1840s

The painter portrayed two African-Americans as outsiders , a man with a red shirt, rolled up work trousers and dusty shoes, and a barefoot girl with shaved head, sitting on a step. Equipped with straw hat, jug and wooden bucket, attributes of the land and relief work , they do seem slaves are and represent in the context of the image issue, the highly topical become by the Mexican territorial concessions about the spread of slavery in the United States up to the American West . The rags that the girl wears as clothes, her shaved hair and her barefootedness allude to the poverty of this social group and thus to pauperism and the social question . As a sign of their extensive social exclusion , the painter depicted the blacks on the edge of the group of figures and outside the stage-like space of the portico. Their low position is also reflected in the fact that they are placed on the bare ground or on the lowest step of the building. Their facial expressions and posture suggest that they are watching the newspaper readers react. It remains to be seen whether they understand it. The older woman, who is looking out of the window on the left edge of the picture, is only a spectator of the action. According to the pictorial message intended by the painter, she is also marginalized , due to a lack of women's suffrage , she is denied political participation.

The Grosch sheet which has represented the artist at the center of the scene was an emerging since the 1830s, high-circulation print product of the so-called "penny presses" that was read because of its affordability of broad sections of the population in the United States and for their political system , a was of great importance because it contributed decisively to the formation of public opinion . The genre of war reporting that has recently appeared in the newspapers, which enabled them to have high print runs and thus profits, was perfected by " embedded journalists ". The Mexican-American War was the first US American war to be accompanied by such reporters, who provided almost daily reports.

The stage-like space of the portico, with which the painter symbolically embraced the male white participants in the formation of political opinion and separated them from the black and female outsiders, is entitled American Hotel . The American eagle is inserted into this name as the heraldic animal of the United States . Due to the selection of the image section, the name tag of the hotel is cut at an angle, so that the full name of the hotel and the eagle shown in the middle can only be seen after closer inspection. In the context of the picture statements, this name and the way it is presented is not just a representation of the small town hotel. Rather, the picture and the stylistic devices used in it indicate that under this title the painter attempted to create a “moral picture” of American society, including social, cultural and political conflicts , in a group portrait of different, but representative social types in an everyday situation to draw the time of the antebellum . The weathered condition of the wooden portico and the aging establishment, for which it serves as an entrance and a classicist architectural element, is a symbolic reference to the situation of the “ superstructure ”, the social and political system of the United States, which the painter perceived as unstable and in need of renovation , to understand.

Formation, reception and provenance

Studio scene , 1836

Workers before the magistrate , 1848

Politics in at Oyster House , 1848

The Reading Cabinet , 1843

Mexican News , hand-colored lithograph by Alfred Jones, 1851, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles

The picture was taken in 1848 in Düsseldorf , at that time the political and cultural center of the Rhine Province in the Kingdom of Prussia . In the middle of the 19th century there was a large colony of American painters who trained artistically at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and in the environment of the Düsseldorf School of Painting . The creator of this painting, Richard Caton Woodville , the eldest son of a distinguished Baltimore family , had lived in the city with his wife since 1845. They had a son there in 1845 and a daughter in 1848.

After a short visit to the art academy, Woodville became a private student of the history painter Karl Ferdinand Sohn . His most important artistic role model, however, was the Düsseldorf genre painter Johann Peter Hasenclever . By joining the artists' association "Crignic", the two got to know each other better from 1846 onwards. Hasenclever's narrative, ironic and socially critical accentuated image concepts, such as that of the studio scene from 1836 or that of the workers before the magistrate from 1848, with which he uses carefully and detailed composed "snapshots" of people in significant life situations to make political or social statements in the Developed a sense of the art of realism and the socially critical " tendency painting ", Woodville took on with interest and tried to adapt them with topics that were suitable for the US market.

Similar to the commissioned work Politics in at Oyster House , which he also painted in Düsseldorf in 1848, Woodville's War News from Mexico thematized the emergence of public opinion through newspaper media and the different attitudes that the bearers of public opinion adopt towards information. Unlike Hasenclever's 1843 genre painting The Reading Cabinet , which shows newspaper readers in the Biedermeier calm and intimacy of a quiet evening interior, Woodville portrayed his newspaper readers as a public in public space who was aroused by a sensation . But similar to the characters in Hasenclever's genre pictures, Woodville differentiated and psychologized the people portrayed as character types.

In 1849, Woodville's War News from Mexico was exhibited in the United States by the American Art Union . In addition to George Caleb Bingham , Woodville was one of the preferred artists of this art association . Under the title Mexican News , prints by Alfred Jones (1819–1900) were distributed as a reproduction of this picture to thousands of members of the American Art Union by subscription. The motif soon became extremely popular.

The painting became privately owned in 1849 and in the collection of the National Academy of Design , New York City, in 1897 . In 1994 it became part of the Manoogian Collection and was loaned by the Richard and Jane Manoogian Foundation to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC . Since 2004 it has been in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art , Bentonville , Arkansas .

literature

• Ron Tyler: Historic Reportage and Artistic License: Prints and Paintings of the Mexican War . In: William Aryes (Ed.): Picturing History: American Painting, 1770–1930 . Rizzoli, New York 1993, pp. 81-99, 101-115.
• Justin P. Wolff: Richard Caton Woodville. American painter . Artful Dodger, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2002, p. 107.
• David B. Dearinger: Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design . Hudson Hills Press, Manchester / Vermont 2004, p. 325.
• Albert Boime : Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871. A Social History of Modern Art . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2008, pp. 406 f. ( Google Books ).
• H. Barbara Weinberg, Carrie Rebora Barratt (Eds.): American Stories. Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 . Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, p. 48 f.
• Jochen Wierich: An American in Düsseldorf . In: Joy Peterson Heyrman (Ed.): New Eyes on America: The Genius of Richard Caton Woodville . Walters Art Museum, Baltimore 2012.
• Tom F. Wright: Proclaiming the War News. Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville . In: Laura Ashe, Ian Patterson: War and Literature . Essays and Studies 2014 (= The New Series of Essays and Studies Collected on Behalf of The English Association, Volume 67), DS Brewer, Cambridge 2014, p. 163 ff.

Web links

• Tom Folland: Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico , picture explanation in the portal smarthistory.org (March 8, 2016)
• War News from Mexico , data sheet including provenance and picture explanations in the portal collection.crystalbridges.org ( Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art )
• Before the Civil War, the Mexican-American War as prelude , explanation of the pictures in English (video, 6:39 min)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eric Robert Papenfuse: The Evils of Necessity. Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (= Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , Volume 87, 1). Philadelphia 1997, ISBN 0-87169-871-4 , p. 75 ( Google Books )
2. ↑ Amy S. Greenberg: A Wicked War. Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1848 US Invasion of Mexico . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2012 ( Google Books )
3. ^ Gail E. Husch: Something Coming. Apocalyptic Expectations and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting . University Press of New England, Hanover / New Hampshire 2000, p. 63 ( Google Books )
4. ↑ Irene Markowitz : Poor painter - painter prince. Artist and society. Düsseldorf 1819–1918 . Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1980, p. 61
5. ^ Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire: An Art of Translation. French Prints and American Art (1848–1876) . Dissertation, Columbia University 2013, p. 84 ( PDF )
6. ↑ Lilian Landes: "... a new subject in the genre". The socially critical genre image of the Düsseldorf School of Painting in an international comparison . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 208
7. ^ Wend von Kalnein : The influence of Düsseldorf on painting outside Germany . In: Wend von Kalnein: The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 204
8. ↑ Lilian Landes, p. 206 f.
9. ^ Sabine Morgen: The broadcast of the Düsseldorf painting school to America . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Ed.), Volume 1, p. 193
10. ↑ Mexican News , data sheet in the portal reynoldahouse.org , accessed on October 28, 2017