NY-USER-RA REJOINED

by Betsy Brayer

“One plus one equals one,” read the eye-catching headline.

NY-USER-RA

The Gallery’s involvement began in 1942 with the purchase of an eleven-inch-high portrait bust from the estate of Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch, professor of economic history at Columbia University.  The Aswan-granite figure had been broken at the elbow with the right arm bent above the break line and holding a mace. Assumed to be from a larger statue, it had been found by Simkhovitch’s expedition to the Temple of Amun at Karnak in   1922.

The scholarly sleuth who put the king back together again was Egyptologist Bernard V. Bothmer, curator of ancient art at the Brooklyn Museum, who had been “on this case.” as she put it, for twenty years.  While lecturing in Rochester in 1952, Bothmer stopped by the Gallery and “noticed in the small Egyptian collection the head and shoulders from a royal sculpture which appeared to date from the Old Kingdom. “At that time,” Bothmer wrote in 1974, “I jotted down a summary description of the piece and, as had long been my habit, noted not only the customary measurements but the dimensions of the break as well.: He also photographed the bust from all four sides and then forgot about it for eighteen years. “As so often happens with one’s notes, not much was done with them.”  However, in those 1952 notes, Bothmer observed the sculpture’s remarkable similarity to the head of a complete statue of Ny-user-ra in Cairo.” Several years later, Bothmer saw another related royal bust on view in the Musée National at Beirut, and fifteen years after that, in 1970, he had the chance to study and measure it closely. Then a footnote in Vandier’s Manual beginning “Le Musée du Caire possede une seconde statue de Nioussere” caught Bothmer’s eye, and soon he was rummaging through the vast uncataloged storerooms of the Cairo Museum.

Vandier and then Bothmer had found a headless torso “representing the king, standing, in the position of marching” languishing in Cairo. Legrain had originally discovered it in 1904 in the cave of Karnak.  The chief historical value of the Cairo torso is a small cartouche on the base identifying Ny-user-ra, an obscure pharaoh who ruled circa 2370-2360 BCE.

The Cairo base did not match the Beirut find; but then “a light clicked.” On the basis of the position of the arms, Bothmer reasoned that it might fit the Rochester bust. Old notes, measurements, and photographs strengthened his surmise. He had a case of the Cairo base made and shipped to the Brooklyn Museum where the borrowed Rochester original was waiting.  Soon he was on the phone to Harris

Prior, director, and Isabel Herdle, curator, with the grand news, “It fits!”

The attempt to ship the plaster case of the bust to Cairo was trickier, running afoul of complex Egyptian import regulations. Taking no chances, Bothmer packed the Ny-user-ra cast as “research material” and flew to Cairo himself. The two pieces were put together during a ceremony in the office of Dr. Henri Riad, director of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

Cairo’s two halves were on view in 1980 with labels written in French, English and Arabic.  Part of each label reads: “Upper part a copy from an original displayed in the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester USA.” Only the words “Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester USA” are in English in all three labels.

Ny-user-ra himself may have been obscure, but obscure can mean rare, and the sculpture is one of the few existing pieces that can be positively ascribed to the period in Egyptian history known as the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Kings   wielding a mace with bulbous head---symbol of royal power---are common in Egyptian painting and relief. According to Bothmer only two sculptures of the king carrying his mace are known, both in repose and both from the Old Kingdom.  One is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the other is “The Rochester-Cairo statue of Ny-user-ra.” The empty but clenched left fist is rare and puzzling, too, Bothmer says.

Bothmer and Vandier both theorized that the red granite statue was made at Thebes, brought to Karnak, and separated in antiquity.  It was either broken during a war, as was the fate of many antique statues, or it was tossed out of the Temple of Amun by priests on a housekeeping binge.

Despite the priests’ contempt and the unfinished ears, the carving on the face is fine, Bothmer said, with eyebrow and eyelids well executed. “While the face of the (unbroken) seated statue (of Ny-user-ra) in Cairo has a brooding, almost sullen expression, the Rochester king appears to be direct, forceful, and somewhat haughty,” Bothmer said in 1980.

One plus one equals one,” Bothmer concluded.

Sources: Interview with Bernard Bothmer, 1988.  Interview with the director of the Cairo Museum, ca. 1980. Curatorial files, including articles in the New York Times and Time magazine                                                                 

Editor’s note: Docent Brayer is the author of Magnum Opus and the biography George Eastman, the latter to be issued in :paperback in honor of the 100^th anniversary of  Eastman.

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery

 

THE HUSDON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

by Libby Clay

Favorite tour stops among docents are at Asher B. Durand’s Genesee Oaks

 and Thomas Cole’s Landscape Composition: Italian Scenery.

Genesee Oaks

These artists represent, of course, the Hudson River School of painters, artists who recorded both idyllic and dramatic scenery in New York State--the White Mountains, the Berkshires and the Adirondacks--and established the tradition of a national landscape art.

The Hudson River, New York

Further down the corridor, across from the Lockhart Gallery, hang two works by another Hudson River Schooler, Jasper Francis Cropsey. Hung one above the other are The Hudson River, New York (73.39) and Chenango River, New York (73.40)

Chenango River, New York

. They are the same size, and both were painted in 1858, leading one to wonder if they were part of a series. Their small size (10 3/8 x 16 7/8 inches) would make an ideal grouping.

Also on view is American Harvesting, after a Painting by Jasper Cropsey (77.196),

American Harvesting

a  painting  of a print which, in turn, was a copy of a painting by Cropsey--prints were a means of bringing artworks to the general public. This work gives an idea of what the artist’s larger paintings were like: full of color and detail and very American..

Correspondence found in the curatorial files zeroes in on The Hudson River and makes the title (and the location) more specific. In the right foreground can be seen the ruins of a building, probably Fort Putnam, built in 1779 high above the United StatesMilitary Academy at West Point. The view of the river would then be looking north toward Newburgh, with Constitution Island to the right. During the Revolutionary War, a great chain was stretched across the Hudson from West Point to ConstitutionIsland to prevent the British from sailing farther up the river. Some of the enormous links from the chain are preserved at Trophy Point at West Point, and the view of the Hudson from there is very similar to that in Cropsey’s painting.

The location of Chenango River (the area near Binghamton, New York) has also been challenged, the objection being that the area is not as rugged as Cropsey paints it. Although the Hudson River School artists sketched out-of-doors and on site, they were not above embellishing when they felt their painting needed  more drama.  After all, they were painting for a public with a taste for romantic landscapes.

Jasper Francis Cropsey had an interesting career. He was of Dutch-Huguenot stock, born February 18, 1823, in Staten Island, New York. His schooling was sporadic and limited to what the neighborhood could provide. In his teens he was apprenticed to an architect; by age twenty he was a practicing architect. He also began to paint, secretly at first, rising at dawn to work until breakfast, then putting in a full day’s work before painting again until night. His landscapes were very much influenced by the works of Thomas Cole and by Cole’s almost mystical reverence for the American wilderness.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  

In 1847 Cropsey and his wife Maria went to Europe for a year. There he settled with a group of American and European painters and saw firsthand the work of European landscape painters, both contemporary and academic. He himself did no painting there, but he executed numerous sketches which he then turned into paintings when he returned to America.

In 1856 he returned to Europe with Maria and their two daughters. They settled in England for a seven-year sojourn, and he became a close friend of the writer and art critic John Ruskin. Cropsey had brought America with him in the form of his sketches, and he developed oil paintings from them. The best of them, Autumn--on the Hudson River was exhibited in the London Exhibition of 1862. (It is now in the National Gallery in Washington.) The British were astonished by the painting, and could not believe that the full brilliance of American autumn was other than the artist’s fantasy. Cropsey placed a pressed autumn leaf from America next to the painting as proof of his realism. (Maria Cropsey had spent the crossing pressing American leaves and flowers into a book.) Queen Victoria bestowed a medal on him for his services with the American Commission of the great London Exposition.

The American Civil War brought Cropsey home again, and he immediately went to the battlefields with an artist’s ammunition: paint and brush. He also continued his architectural career, designing stations and platforms for the Sixth Avenue Elevated train platforms in New York City, and executing a design for a five-story, multi-family house long before apartment houses were built in America. He also designed private homes, including his own, “Aladdin,” at Warwick, New York.

Jasper Cropsey, though not as well known as Cole and Durand, carried on their tradition of the romantic landscape. His vivid colors, sometimes almost brash, reflected his love of the land and also the profound changes in ideas and ideals that took place in America from the middle decades of the 19^th century to the Civil War:

                1. Regarding the natural world, the feeling changed from a desire to conquer it, as on the frontier, to living in harmony with nature, enjoying it, and respecting it as an expression of God’s grandeur or purpose.

                2. A new outlook emerged on man’s place in the cosmos, and a new notion of what makes up a good life, including the idea that life is a pilgrimage, a voyage.

Eventually American landscape paintings became, by their very nature, somewhat repetitious, and public demand for  them waned. Cropsey lamented the diminishing wilderness as much as the diminishing demand. He sold “Aladdin” and bought a more modest home at Hastings-on-Hudson. He died in 1900, known particularly for his autumn scenes.

His great-granddaughters have turned his home and studio into a Cropsey memorial and center for scholarly and artistic study. It is open by appointment.

Source: Curatorial files; article by M. Therese Southgate, MD, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, October 7, 1998; John K. Howat:The Hudson River and its Painters, Viking Press.