Vincent Colyer

Vincent Colyer is an acknowledged master of American topographical watercolors. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1849 and became prominent in the 1850s as a New York portraitist. During the Civil War he was involved in a variety of humanitarian concerns, as well as the recruitment and training of Black troops. After his travels in the American West in 1868-71, he moved to Darien, Connecticut, and established a painting studio named after his close friend, John Kensett. The two painters were linked in tragedy, for Kensett caught a cold, which ultimately proved fatal, while attempting to recover the drowned body of Mrs. Colyer from Long Island Sound.

Colyer's most significant artistic contribution stems from his three years in the West. He was named secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners, an agency closely allied to the Grant administration, which sought to solve the western and Alaskan Indian "problems" by peaceful means. Colyer travelled all over the West visiting Indian tribes and reservations. He found himself at cross purposes with many of the short-tempered frontiersmen who generally favored killing Indians. In 1871, soon after securing a large federal appropriation for Alaskan Indian education, Colyer embarked on an ambitious mission to improve the condition of Indians in the Southwest. His effort to establish reservations for the Apache, Yavapai, and neighboring tribes in New Mexico and Arizona, at the expense of white mining, cattle and agricultural interests, was futile and led to the end of his mission. During the entire period he recorded scenes in watercolor. His small, painterly watercolor sketches of western forts, early settlements and Indian villages, from New Mexico to Alaska, are an important artistic and visual record. More than two hundred of those sketches, mostly accomplished in the field between 1868 and 1872 while working as a Special Indian Commissioner, are found in major institutional collections. The Beinecke Library at Yale owns fifty of his Alaskan views (a number of them incorporating studies of weather phenomena) made in 1869, the same year he is believed to have sketched fifteen views of Oregon and the Washington Territory, upon which this painting is doubtless based.

When Colyer returned east and established his studio, he produced a small group of oil paintings based on his western experiences. These were prominently exhibited at the time, including at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. "The subject alone gives marked interest to atmospheric effects," so commented the catalogue for the 1873 Cincinnati Industrial Exposition on Colyer's (lost) Oregon painting, "Castle Rock, Entrance to the Cascade Mountains, Columbia River." Apparently Colyer found the Columbia River a particularly intriguing subject for such oils, and stormy weather figures in at least two other of his known (but lost) oil paintings of the region. All of the limited group of western oils seems to have been executed in 1872-75, after which he produced only Connecticut scenes.

The rarity of Vincent Colyer's western oil paintings cannot be overstated. The only sale record we can find in modern times is "The Home of the Yakama Indians," a picture quite similar in composition and size to the present work, which Hammer Galleries sold in 1968 for $16,500. Several important oils were handled by Edward Eberstadt & Sons in the 1950s (it was they who discovered and distributed the cache of Colyer watercolors, probably bought from a descendant). No other western paintings by this major but little-known artist, have appeared for sale in the last several decades.

Provenance: John M. Stearns, ca. 1876; Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut (1869-72), prior to 1883; Family of Marshall Jewell, by descent, 1883-ca. 1948; Cedric Robinson, Windsor, Ct., purchased at the Jewell family estate sale, ca. 1948-98.

Public Exhibitions by Vincent Colyer: United States Centennial Commission International Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), National Academy of Design, American Art-Union, Boston Athenaeum, Pennsylvania Academy, Maryland Historical Society, Cincinnati Industrial Exposition (1873), Yale School of Fine Arts (1863), Chicago Interstate Industrial Exposition (1875), Artist's Fund Society (ca. 1863-74).

Public Collections: Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa), Albuquerque Museum of Art, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University);
UNITED STATES CENTENNIAL COMMISSION. INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION 1876 OFFICIAL CATALOGUE. PART II (Philadelphia, 1876), p.24, no. 233, listed as "Cascade Mountains." National Academy of Design, CATALOGUE OF THE FIFTY-FIRST ANNUAL EXHIBITION 1876, p.24.

Robert Taft, ARTISTS & ILLUSTRATORS OF THE OLD WEST 1850-1900. (Boston, 1953), p.322. Peggy and Harold Samuels, ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST (New York, 1976), p.103. Doris Ostrander Dawdy, ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST - A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY (Chicago, 1980), p.53. BENEZIT (Paris, 1955) II, p.593. GROCE & WALLACE, p.142 . Henry W. French, ART AND ARTISTS IN CONNECTICUT (Boston, 1879), pp.123-25.