Corcoran showcases American form

WASHINGTON - With images ranging from a primped diplomat's wife of the late 1800s, swathed in gleaming white, to a bunch of skinny kids cavorting off a dock in New York Harbor, the capital's oldest art museum is celebrating the human figure in American painting.

There are 85 paintings and other images in the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibit, called "Figuratively Speaking - The Human Form in American Art 1770-1950." Done by famous and less-famous artists, the paintings offer a fascinating look at people of various time periods, what they wore and the places they lived and worked.

The diplomat's wife is Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White, known as Daisy to her high society friends. She looks larger than life in the painting by John Singer Sargent, the most successful portraitist of his day.

The 42 dead-end kids on the East River were the work of George Bellows, a painter of sports and city life, who unlike many American painters never visited Europe.

One of the most prized items in the exhibit is a mask cast from the bust of George Washington by the famous French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon. The bust itself was made from a life mask that Houdon molded on a visit to Washington's Mount Vernon, Va., home.

That event much alarmed 6-year-old Nelly Custis, Martha Washington's granddaughter from a previous marriage. Nelly saw Washington stretched out on a table, his face covered with plaster except for two quills stuck in his nose so he could breathe. She wrote later that she thought the man she considered as her father was dead.

The gallery calls its mask the most accurate image of Washington's face when he was 53, shortly before he presided over the Convention that drafted the Constitution in 1787.

Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, painted a monumental view nearly 11 feet long and over seven feet high of the House of Representatives convening in November 1821 to discuss how to deal with American Indians. A Pawnee chief in full regalia sits in a corner of the gallery.

Sarah Cash, curator of American art at the Corcoran, describes the painting as "a grand project designed to represent America's daring experiment with democracy" - an experiment then only a few decades old.

In the middle of the painting, amid the well-dressed lawmakers, stands a stepladder with a workman at the top, busy with the candles or lamps on a massive chandelier. It furnishes most of the light in the windowless chamber.

The exhibit will be on view through May 23.

World and national headlines

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 Contact the Times | Privacy Policy Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright