Description
This volume is the first in over 50 years to focus on the work, life and career of 19th-century genre painter John Quidor (1801–1881), introducing new audiences to the offbeat and frenzied paintings of a visionary artist whose eccentric style became formative to American Romanticism.
Born and raised in the small town of Tappan along the Hudson River, Quidor later lived and worked in the notorious Five Points district of New York City. There, he skirted the margins of the New York art world, splitting his career between painting engine panels for the city’s fire brigades and producing literary genre scenes, most based on the tales of Washington Irving and steeped in the Netherlandish lore of the Hudson River Valley. Across these pursuits, Quidor upended the conventions of both history and history painting. During an age that prized reason and exalted history, he presented the past not as fact but as an elusive matter bound to invention, imagination and selective storytelling. This catalogue explores his artistic and critical approach to a past that can never fully be known.
This new book interweaves some of Quidor’s best known literary paintings—scenes from Irving’s A History of New-York and Tales of a Traveller, as well as the short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—with new objects including a plaster bas-relief representing the second only known likeness of the artist, his sole surviving engine painting for New York City’s early firefighting companies, and a newly rediscovered student copy after Quidor’s lost original for Columbian Fire Engine No. 14.
The catalogue features works from The New York Historical, as well as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Newark Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Historic Hudson Valley; Yale University Art Gallery; and Brooklyn Museum.
Author biographies
Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto is vice president and chief curator at The New York Historical
Elizabeth L. Bradley is vice president of Programs and Engagement at Historic Hudson Valley, NY
Table of Contents
- Foreword by Louise Mirrer
- Preface by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto
- Acknowledgments by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto
- John Quidor: Darker Histories by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto
- “Legendary Ground”: Washington Irving and the Hudson Valley by Elizabeth L. Bradley
- Selected Bibliography
- Photography Credits
- Index
