A MAN WHO EXPLORED THE AMERICAS WITH GREAT ARTISTS

By admin

A SPECIAL NOTE

Yesterday, I stumbled on a CSPAN-3 history program on Alexander von Humboldt. I was immediately fascinated by the story of this explorer, artist, scientist, adventurer and diplomat.

I suggest you watch the two videos about the exhibit at the SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM. The videos are presented by Senior Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey
https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-1/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-1
https://www.c-span.org/video/?507040-2/alexander-von-humboldt-united-states-exhibit-part-2

There is also a great 4 minute video for kids explaining who Humboldt was. (Suitable for adults too)

As soon as the Smithsonian re-opens, let’s go!

Alexander von Humboldt
and the United States:
Art, Nature, and Culture

Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), 1806, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Klaus Goeken / Art Resource, NY.

292nd Edition

FEBRUARY 20-21,  2021

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling four years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about Humboldt’s lasting influence on the way we think about our relationship to the natural world. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.

This exhibition will be the first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Géographie des plantes Équinoxiales: Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, from Essai sur la géographie des plantes, 1805, hand-colored print, 24 x 36 in., Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, © Copyright The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

ABOUT THIS ARTWORK

In 1805 Humboldt and Bonpland published this plant geography map, which Humboldt called his Naturgemälde or “picture of nature.” It combines illusionistic watercolor with a cutaway diagram labeled with the plants he and Bonpland observed in South America, shown at the altitudes where they found them. This map affirmed his belief that the distribution of plants around the globe could be correlated based on altitude and the rock underneath. By amassing and comparing this kind of data, Humboldt refined his theory that everything on the planet was interrelated. His idea of the unity of nature —that plants, animals, and climate are related in ecosystems—is widely accepted today, but was a radical concept when Humboldt first began writing about it.

Skeleton of the Mastodon, excavated 1801–2 by Charles Willson Peale, bone, wood, and papier mâché, approx. 118 × 177 × 65 in., Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany, Photo: Wolfgang Fuhrmannek, © Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt.

Artworks by Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Church, Eastman Johnson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Willson Peale, John Rogers, William James Stillman, and John Quincy Adams Ward, among others, will be on display. The installation features a digital exploration of Frederic Church’s famous landscape, Heart of the Andes (1859), enabling visitors to engage with the painting’s details in new ways. The wealth of detail is a painterly extrapolation of Humboldt’s plant geography map. The mountain at the center of the work, Chimborazo, was referred to as “Humboldt’s Mountain.” The narrated, 2.5D animated projection enables visitors to appreciate the connections between Church’s painting and Humboldt’s ideas.

The exhibition also includes the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early nineteenth century. Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847, and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States.

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A major catalogue, written by Eleanor Jones Harvey, accompanies the exhibition. The book shows how Humboldt inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America’s wilderness as a signature component of the nation’s sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt’s ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service

.The catalogue is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Princeton University Press; it is available for purchase ($75) online.

Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait with Mastodon Bone, 1824, oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 22 in., New-York Historical Society, Purchase, James B. Wilbur Fund, Photography ©New-York Historical Society, negative #8736c.

ABOUT THIS ARTWORK

In this late self-portrait, the elder Peale gestures to the femur of a mastodon. The discovery of the mastodon had been Peale’s inspiration to expand his museum and the complete skeleton was his prize attraction. The femur held special meaning: it was the index bone that allowed one to estimate the overall size of the animal. Like Humboldt’s barometer, it represented what Peale cherished most: the ability to use parts of nature to take the measure of the whole. Here it suggests the summation of Peale’s life as an artist, scientist, and museum founder. Peale had hoped that his museum might become a national institute; however, it would be James Smithson’s bequest that enabled the country to establish the kind of museum complex Peale envisioned.

After Eduard Hildebrandt, Humboldt in His Library, 1856, chromolithograph on paper, 18 5/8 x 26 5/8 in., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Norfleet Jr., Photo: Travis Fullerton, Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

ABOUT THIS ARTWORK

In 1855, Smithsonian Regent and art collector William Wilson Corcoran traveled to Europe with former president Millard Fillmore. Carrying a letter on Smithsonian letterhead, they met Humboldt in Berlin, where the aging naturalist welcomed them, showing them around the city and arranging for a dinner with the Prussian king. Corcoran commissioned a marble bust of Humboldt; Fillmore returned with this color print showing Humboldt in his library, surrounded by his books, travel diaries, maps, specimens, and artworks. His rooms had come to resemble Peale’s museum. The globe is positioned to show the regions he visited in South and North America.

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF  HOW THE
SMITHSONIAN CAME TO BE!!! 

James Smithson: Founder of the Smithsonian Institution

Engraving of James Smithson, by Heliotype Printing Co., c. 1881

James Smithson (c. 1765-1829), founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution, was born in 1765 in France with the name James Lewis Macie. The illegitimate son of Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie and Hugh Smithson, 1st Duke of Northumberland, he changed his name as well as his citizenship, becoming a naturalized British citizen around the age of ten. After his parents’ death, he became known as James Smithson rather than James Macie. On May 7, 1782, he enrolled in Pembroke College, Oxford, and graduated four years later. The natural sciences sparked his interest, and he established a solid reputation as a chemist and mineralogist, during the exciting period when chemistry was being developed as a new science in the late 1700s. Committed to discovering the basic elements, he worked diligently to collect mineral and ore samples from European countries. Excerpts from his notes show that his field excursions often forced him to brave the elements and do without the upper class comforts known to his parents. Smithson, although a wealthy man, was determined to make a name for himself among scientists. He kept accurate records of his experiments and collections, and his publications earned the respect of his peers. The Royal Society of London recognized his scientific abilities and accepted his membership on April 26, 1787, only a year after he graduated from college, an unusual honor for someone so young. The society became an outlet for publishing many of his papers, which covered a wide range of scientific topics, and also was a meeting place for Smithson and other scientists.
James Smithson wrote a draft of his Last Will and Testament in 1826 in London, only three years before he died. He died on June 27, 1829, in Genoa, Italy, where he was buried in a British cemetery. The will left his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, and stated that if his nephew died without an heir, the money would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge ….” After his nephew died without an heir, Smithson’s estate did come to the United States and a debate began about what this new institution would be.

First, Richard Rush, an attorney from Philadelphia, filed a lawsuit in London to get the Smithson estate for the United States. Rush brought Smithson’s personal effects to the United States in 1838, along with the money from his estate. Then Congressional debates continued until 1846 when legislation was passed creating the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately, a fire in the Smithsonian Institution Building or Castle in 1865 destroyed many of the Smithson letters, diaries, and other papers originally acquired by the Institution. As a result of the fire, the Smithsonian Institution Archives does not have very many of James Smithson’s original letters or other papers. Among those that the Smithsonian Institution Archives does have are a handwritten draft of Smithson’s Last Will and Testament, dated October 23, 1826, and his “Receipt Book” containing formulas for food, beverages, and everyday products.

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Text by Judith Berdy
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Edited by  Deborah Dorff
Roosevelt Island Historical Society

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