$144,000
American School, 19th Century The Junction formed in Medford by the Meeting of the [Mystic] River, Canal, and Railroad. Unsigned, titled in inscriptions below. Oil on fiberboard, 19 1/4 x 22 1/2 in., in a black-painted wood frame with gilt-brass floriform bosses in the corners. Condition: Minor retouch. Literature: A similar painting by the same unknown artist is pictured in Sumpter Priddy, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts 1790-1840 (Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), p. 124, and is pictured in an advertisement for Marguerite Riordan, Stonington, Connecticut, in The Magazine Antiques , September 1987, p. 373. Provenance: Descended from the original owner in the Brooks-Wheeler family of Watertown, Concord, Medford, and Winchester, Massachusetts. Note: In the 1830s, the public imagination in the United States was captivated by motion. Canals were connecting eastern cities with Western resources, like the Erie Canal in New York and the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. Radiating outward from trade centers like Baltimore and Boston, the earliest railroads began to snake through rural areas, offering faster and more reliable transport for goods and passengers throughout the year. Daredevils and showmen took to the air in balloons, making headlines with their well-attended launches from public spaces like the Boston Common. Americans observed these developments from their homes and farms, reading newspaper accounts of railroad construction and saving p Read more…
Auctioneer:
Skinner
Date:
2013-03-03
