William S. Haseltine
American, 1835-1900

Indian Rock, Narragansett Sound, Rhode Island, 1863 or 1868
oil on canvas
22 3/8 x 18 1/4 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mary and Will Richeson Jr.
1980.75.1



This photograph of William Stanley Haseltine was taken in the New York studio of Mathew Brady during the mid-1860s.

RESEARCH PAPER

PERSONAL AND ARTISTIC BACKGROUND

William Stanley Haseltine was born on June 11, 1835, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one of fourteen children born to a wealthy merchant father and a famous beauty of a mother. His ancestors were Puritans on his father’s side and French Huguenots on his mother’s. His mother, also an artist, encouraged his artistic interest. At the age of fifteen, he arrived on the doorstep of the artist and teacher, Paul Weber in Philadelphia.

Weber was born in Germany, educated at the Düsseldorf Academy, painted landscapes in the German Romantic tradition and was struggling to survive as an artist in the United States. He studied William’s small portfolio and took him on as a pupil that day. Haseltine also attended the University of Pennsylvania at the same time. This dual training continued for two years until he felt stifled and transferred to Harvard University where he entertained in the Hasty Pudding Club, painted the doors of his dormitory room with animals, (they are still there having been uncovered and restored after 100 years), and graduated in 1854.

He returned to Philadelphia for a year’s study with Weber, who was credited with having given him his strong footing in the technique of drawing that would be with him all of his life. Both student and teacher were restless. Weber convinced Haseltine of the benefits of further study in Europe. Haseltine convinced his father to support the move, pleading that he could learn and focus in an environment surrounded by artists. He and Weber traveled to Düsseldorf in 1855. Haseltine parted with Weber, taking on the great artist, Andreas Achenbach, as his teacher.

Düsseldorf had become one of Europe’s great centers for the study of art with the founding of its Academy in the early 19th century. The education was innovative, stressing a thorough training in draftsmanship and was the first to teach landscape painting. The Academy influenced the landscape tradition of the Barbizon School in France and the Hudson River School in the United States. It embraced the tradition of Romanticism, which portrayed nature as God created it. German Romanticism as expressed through the Academy’s standards stressed careful and accurate drawing as the basis for the true study of nature. Achenbach taught drawing according to these maxims, though he had resigned from the Academy and set up his own school. Haseltine lived and studied with him from 1855-1857. He thus overlapped with Emmanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt, all of whom were in Düsseldorf to receive the final polishing that American artists could not obtain at home. The four young artists became friends and remained so for life. They spent the summers of 1856 and 1857 sketching in Switzerland and up and down the Rhine. In the autumn of 1857 they all went to Italy and finally Rome for the year. It was this voyage that would change Haseltine’s life forever. He met a young American woman named Helen Lane, falling in love with both her and the light and terrain of Italy.

He returned to the United States in the summer of 1858 and settled briefly with his family. But, feeling constrained, he joined his friends in the winter of 1859 in the 10th Street studios of New York City. All the great Hudson River painters were there and the stimulation set Haseltine on the path towards his own professionalism. He was no longer the student. He began to sell his paintings at the studio shows. In 1860 he married the beautiful, wealthy Helen Lane, a musician and fellow member of the upper class.

In 1861 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Between 1860 and 1864 Haseltine achieved recognition in his country as one of its great young landscape painters. He exhibited frequently at the Century Club, the Salmagundi Club and the National Academy. His wife had given him a son, Stanley. During the birth of their second child, on Haseltine’s 29th birthday in 1864, she died along with the newborn. Haseltine was stricken with grief and sought refuge in sketching along the Delaware River Valley and the New England Coast. Some of his strongest and most poignant paintings are from this period.

The next decade, 1864-1874, saw the maturation of Haseltine’s personal style and the stabilizing of his personal life. He married Helen Marshall, his deceased wife’s best friend, in 1866 and remained with her the rest of his life. He spent a year working with the Barbizon painters in France and befriended Courbet, Monet and Gerome. He returned to Italy for a long period of painting. He visited the United States annually to exhibit and paint the New England coastal scenes that made him famous. He once said he had so many commissions for these views that he feared he would never have time to paint anything else.

In 1874, burdened with family obligations in the United States, he moved with his wife and children to the Palazzo Altieri in Rome, built in the 16th century by Pope Clement X. He never moved again, becoming a famous expatriate well known to all foreigners who visited Rome. His salon was renowned as a gathering place for artists, politicians of all stripes, clergy and the aristocracy of Europe. Haseltine was an avid collector and the palace was filled with beautiful treasures.

He continued to paint and travel extensively. Through his inheritance, he was now independently wealthy, and painted for his own pleasure while also accepting commissions from around the world. He exhibited his Italian landscaped at the Paris Salon every year. In 1893 he served on the committee to select paintings by American artists living in Italy for the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1894 he helped found the American School of Architecture in Rome that would eventually become the American Academy in Rome. (It owns three of his paintings).

In 1879 he lost his brilliant son Stanley, the child by his first wife. He made several long trips back to his native country to check on his popularity, which always remained strong, even when the Hudson River style was passé. With his sculptor son, Herbert, he made his last visit to the U.S. in the summer of 1899, traveling to California, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, creating beautiful paintings of the Monterey cypresses. He returned to Rome and died on February 3, 1900, having suffered silently from angina for many years. Found in his studio, in addition to oil paintings, were over 400 oil sketches, 500 watercolors and scores of sketchbooks.

Haseltine was tall, robust and handsome. He loved the elements and could walk or climb for hours on end and always whistled as he sketched. He was somewhat shy and reticent, yet was a great entertainer. A devout family man, he also had a gift for friendship and an intense interest in politics. His passionate sidelines included trout fishing, gardening and astronomy. He had what many called a sunny personality, a ready smile, and he loved beauty. He had the soul of a child, was often termed a “genius,” and did not thrive on turmoil. His sense of harmony in life is accurately reflected in all his work. He was an expatriate American for much of his life yet always had a painting of George Washington hanging above his desk.

STYLE

Haseltine’s style, which varied little throughout his life, fits no neat category, though it is linked to many. Its strongest influence is the Düsseldorf Academy style of clarity and precise rendering. He was so entrenched in this style that he later could not bend to new ideas and forms. He portrayed nature realistically, according to the rules of both German Romanticism and Barbizon. He was linked to and exhibited with his friends of the Hudson River School and yet, did not express emotion and spirituality in his canvases as many of them did. He was a “plein air” painter, always sketching outdoors from real life, which places him with those schools but also as a forerunner of the Impressionists. He painted according to John Ruskin’s truth-to-nature theories and has also been placed with great American marine painters, many of them from Philadelphia where there was a traditional interest in the subject. (Thomas Birch, William Trost Richards, James Hamilton). He was a master at capturing light and atmosphere and using horizontals in the way of the Luminist painters.

He was well known in his day, yet perhaps because he does not fit into any recognizable group, he has slipped through the cracks and remains fairly unknown today compared with his three friends in Düsseldorf. He is certainly as skilled as the best of his generation.

His subject matter, always landscapes, was varied with Italian architecture, lakes and mountains. But it was his East Coast seascapes that made him famous. His rocks were so accurate that many people asked if he was a geologist. He could capture the local characteristics of light and had an uncanny knowledge of the sea coloring. He was also known as a master of waves and clouds. Critics often found his work to be too vigorous and objective, too bold and modern compared with his colleagues. He was indifferent to them, for his only concern was to recreate, with the tools at hand, the beauty that was put before him. He was not a visionary. He never projected his personality into his work. He let nature express itself through him. He was a deliberate artist, working with great concentration and he never had to rework. Each stroke was the correct one.

Haseltine knew and admired the Impressionists during his visits to Paris. Critics see Monet’s influence on his later work, between 1880-1900. His palette became brighter. His strokes are more painterly. His interest in the effects of light increased. Some critics call him an independent American Impressionist. The key word for Haseltine is independent.

INDIAN ROCK, NARRAGANSETT SOUND, RHODE ISLAND

Indian Rock was a popular promontory to paint for Luminists and Hudson Ricer artists. It has a unique shape that catches the eye and has red stains that are supposed to be from Indian blood shed in warfare with settlers; blood which no wave can wash away. The overall effect of the composition is one of harmony, balance and serenity. Haseltine has helped nature with his choice of perspective. The canvas is divided in two by the horizontal line; Indian Rock sits close to the center, though slightly to the left of it. There is a vertical separation between the left and right done by juxtaposing rock and water. The painting is therefore equally divided into four areas, two of them being simply sky. Our eyes begin at the lower left foreground of the rocks, move to the middle ground of Indian Rock, and then end at the small sailboat and the intense blue of the water, creating a calm feeling. These devices, canvas horizontally divided in two, one side a close-up of rocks and the other, water and a boat, were continually used by Haseltine in his New England seascapes.

Whereas other marine painters usually painted from a perspective high above the water, Haseltine has us down among the rocks at the water’s edge. These rocks confront us. This creates a tension and drama in the painting that is soothed by the water and sky that take up two-thirds of its space. The artist has a few people scattered among the rocks, insignificant against their power. He often put people into his seascapes, possibly as a reminder of man’s impermanence as opposed to nature’s immortality. Similarly, there are small white dots of sailboats in the far distance.

He has a dark foreground with light hitting the rocks in the middle ground. Indian Rock is the only one in full light. It is also a much lighter color, almost like sunset. The sun seems to be fairly low on the horizon, judging from the shadows on the rocks. Cool blues and greens are the main colors of the sea and sky, hence of the composition. They are contrasted with the warm browns and reds of the rocks. There is wonderful textural contrast as well— jagged rocks versus smooth water, silky sky versus the lace of the waves. There is a crystalline clarity to this seascape and there is in all his seascapes. There is a stillness and lucidity that makes it wonderful to gaze upon. This shore is a symbol of his two worlds, his two homes.

Prepared for SBMA Docent Council by Debra Friedland April, 1985.
Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council web site by Andrea Gallo, fall 2012 and edited by Lori Mohr.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books:
Benezit, Emmanuel, Dictionaire Critique et Documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, 8 vols. New Edition, Paris
Clement, Clara Erskin and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, 2 vols. In one vol. St. Louis, North Point 1969
Hoopes, Donelson F. American Watercolor Painting, New York, Watson- Guptill Publications, 1977
Howat, John K. The Hudson River and Its Painters, New York, Viking Press, 1972
Karpel, Bernard, Arts in America, A Bibliography, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institute Press, 1979, Vol. 2 Painting and Graphic Arts
Novak, Barbara and Annette Blaugrand, ed. Next to Nature: Landscape Painting From The National Academy of Design , New York, National Academy of Design, 1980
Plowdon, Helen Haseltine, William Stanley Haseltine, London, Miller LTD, 1947
Wilmerding, John, A History of American Marine Painting, Salem, MA, The Peabody Museum, 1968
Wilmerding, John, American Light-The Luminist Movement 1850-1875, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1980

Exhibition and Collection Catalogues:
Corcoran Gallery of Art, “A Catalog of the Collection of American Painting in the Corcoran Gallery of Art,” Vol. 1, 1966
Danforth Museum, “American Artists in Düsseldorf: 1840-1865,” September 12-November 28, 1982
Davis and Langdale Company, Inc. “William Stanley Haseltine-Drawings of a Painter,” March 5-April 2, 1983
Dayton Art Institute, “American Expatriate Painters of the Late Nineteenth Century,” December 4, 1976-January 16, 1977
Indiana University of Art Museum, “The American Scene 1820-1900: An Exhibition of Landscape and Outdoor Genre,” January 18-February 28, 1970
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, “The Hudson and The Rhine,” May 23-June 20, 1976
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, “M.& M. Karolik Collection of American Watercolors and Drawings, 1800-1875, Vol. 1,
October 18, 1962 – January 6, 1963
National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institute, “Emanuel Leutze, 1816-1868: Freedom is the Only King,” January 16-March 14, 1976

Periodicals:
Bauer, John I.H., “American Luminism,” Perspectives U.S.A. Number 9,
Autumn 1954, pp 90-98


POSTSCRIPT

In 1961, his daughter and biographer, Helen Haseltine Plowden, wanted her father’s work to return to his native country. Together with the Director of the National Academy of Design, she placed over 90 works in museum collections across the United States.

SBMA’s painting was reproduced as an engraving for a popular book entitled “Picturesque America” edited by William Cullen Bryant and published in 1872.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Haseltine was one of a group of American artists, who traveled throughout Europe, and in particular, to Düsseldorf and Rome to study landscape painting in the 1850s. The present landscape exhibits all of the qualities for which he was critically praised when he returned to New York to join Bierstadt, Church, and Whittredge at the Tenth Street Studio Building in 1858. Critics in particular responded admiringly to his accurate depiction of the geographical particularity of the rocky coast of New England, as evidenced in this painting.

- Preston Morton Reinstallation, 2022