William Stanley Haseltine Art

Fishing Boats, Venice recalls a time, a place, and a social circle that lived for a charmed moment and a favored few in nineteenth-century Europe. William Stanley Haseltine was an American expatriate artist who made his home and studio “into a permanent meeting ground for the many distinguished foreigners, Americans and English, who came to Rome. . . .” (Helen Haseltine Plowden, William Stanley Haseltine, Sea and Landscape Painter (1835-1900): Notes and Recollections From His Life [1947], p. 97). Among these were Louisa Crawford Ward (daughter of New York banker and art patron Samuel Ward, sister of Julia Ward Howe, and widow of American sculptor Thomas Crawford); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Frederick Crowninshield (Boston Brahmin poet and painter); artist Edward Darley Boit; lawyer Joseph Choate; historian George Bancroft; writer Charles Francis Adams; and financier Junius Spencer Morgan, father of John Pierrepont Morgan, the original owner of this work. From 1874 until the artist's death, the family lived in the Palazzo Altieri, a sixteenth-century residence built by Cardinal Gian Battista Altieri Seniore and his uncle Pope Clement X. The Haseltines gathered together under their splendid and commodious roof an international literary, cultural, and artistic salon with a distinctly American accent. The career of William Stanley Haseltine spans the entire second half of the nineteenth century. During these years he witnessed the growth and decline of American landscape painting, the new concept of plein-air painting practiced by the Barbizon artists, and the revolutionary techniques of the French Impressionists, all of which had profound effects on the development of painting in the western world. Haseltine remained open to these new developments, selecting aspects of each and assimilating them into his work. What remained constant was his love of nature and his skill at rendering exactly what he saw. His views, at once precise and poetic, are, in effect, portraits of the many places he visited and the landscapes he loved. Haseltine was born in Philadelphia, the son of a prosperous businessman. In 1850, at the age of fifteen, he began studying with Paul Weber, a German artist who had settled in Philadelphia two years earlier. From Weber, Haseltine learned about Romanticism and the meticulous draftsmanship that characterized the German School. At the same time, Haseltine enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, and took sketching trips around the Pennsylvania countryside, exploring areas along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers. Following his sophomore year, Haseltine transferred to Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1854, Haseltine returned to Philadelphia and resumed his studies with Weber. Although Weber encouraged Haseltine to continue his training in Europe, the elder Haseltine was reluctant to encourage his son to pursue a career as an artist. During the next year, Haseltine took various sketching trips along the Hudson River and produced a number of pictures, some of which were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 1855. Ultimately, having convinced his father that he should be allowed to study in Europe, Haseltine accompanied Weber to Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorf Academy was, during the 1850s, at the peak of its popularity among American artists. The Academy’s strict course of study emphasized the importance of accurate draftsmanship and a strong sense of professionalism. Landscape painting was the dominant department at the Düsseldorf Academy during this period, and the most famous landscape painter there was Andreas Achenbach, under whom Haseltine studied. Achenbach’s realistic style stressed close observation of form and detail, and reinforced much of what Haseltine had already learned. His Düsseldorf training remained an important influence on him for the rest of his life. At Düsseldorf, Haseltine became friendly with other American artists studying there, especially Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt. They were constant companions, and in the spring and summer months took sketching trips together. In the summer of 1856 the group took a tour of the Rhine, Ahr, and Nahe valleys, continuing through the Swiss alps and over the Saint Gotthard Pass into northern Italy. The following summer Haseltine, Whittredge, and the painter John Irving returned to Switzerland and Italy, and this time continued on to Rome. Rome was a fertile ground for artists at mid-century. Virtually every major artist went there at some point, and some set up permanent homes and studios. When Haseltine arrived in the fall of 1857, the American sculptors Harriet Hosmer, Chauncey B. Ives, Joseph Mozier, William Henry Rinehart...