Essay
Provenance
Alexander Gallery, New York
Russell Smith was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and immigrated to the United States at age seven. Largely self-taught except for a four-year apprenticeship with the artist James Reid Lambdin, he spent most of his life in Philadelphia, where he was among the most celebrated scenery painters in the city’s active theater scene. Smith’s work was in demand up and down the eastern seaboard, and he executed drop curtains for theaters from Savannah to Manhattan. Theater critics frequently praised his work; at the end of his life, one noted simply, “For half a century, Russell Smith has been at the head of his profession. He is a master.”[1]
But Smith, and the critics, saw his true role as that of an artist, and he was particularly well known for his landscape paintings. Forest Window and Italian Window are painted with oil on shaped wooden panels, a common trompe l’oeil conceit that gives the viewer the illusion of looking out an actual window. Paired, or pendant, works were popular with American artists since they provided a built-in narrative structure, allowing them to “[break] the constraints on meaning imposed by depicting a single scene”[2] and juxtapose two antithetical ideas or concepts such as day and night, peace and war, or, in this case, the Old and New Worlds. Nineteenth-century American artists struggled to come to terms with the legacy of European landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain, whose works were steeped in literary and historical associations from antiquity, while still affirming the splendor of the raw American wilderness. Smith cleverly split these concerns into two separate works, demonstrating his ability to master both modes of landscape painting.
Forest Window artfully combines an interior forest view with a panoramic vista. As noted on the verso, it was painted at Edgehill, Smith’s home just north of Philadelphia. Like Frederic Edwin Church’s Olana or Albert Bierstadt’s Malkasten, Edgehill was more than a house—it was an artistic statement in a Romanesque revival style that recalled the medieval castles that Smith might have seen while traveling in Europe with his family in 1851 and 1852.[3] Smith’s painting studio was located in a high stone tower attached to the house, overlooking wild scenery. It is possible that the rounded arch windows in these paintings were inspired by the architecture he saw every day. In Forest Window, crumbled, mossy stone suggesting masonry is clearly visible in the lower registers but subtly blends with, and eventually disappears into, the natural vault formed by tree branches overhead. This Narnia-like feeling is tempered by the same close attention to natural detail that made Smith a valuable addition to the various geological surveys and scientific expeditions for which he was hired as an illustrator.
The companion piece, Italian Window, substitutes the cool, pastel palette of the Roman countryside for America’s brash greens and blues and looks onto a landscape studded with references to antiquity, from the commemorative monument recalling Trajan’s Column to the elegant stone aqueduct traversing the river in the distance. Smith’s numerous sketches of the Italian landscape likely formed the source material for this later painting. Like many American artists, Smith carefully guarded the genius of his adopted land from too much European influence. This work, however, shows that he carefully studied the Old Masters, particularly Claude. Soft light that may suggest sunset spills over the worn stones of the triumphal arch, perhaps indicating that Europe and her landscape painters have entered their twilight phase while American landscape painting has just begun.
CRH
During his lifetime, Russell Smith exhibited at the New York Sanitary Fair, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He was elected a member of the Artists’ Fund Society and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Today, his works are owned by the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.