May Morning Stroll through 19th Century American Art at the PMA

This weekend I took a little tour into Emaline’s world. It wasn’t intentional. It just happened. It was a beautiful May morning and I was at Fairmount Park to watch the Dad Vail Regatta, but there it was: Presiding over the city at the top of the Rocky stairs stood the grand Greek Revival repository for one of the largest and most significant collections of art in the United States. It’s been years since I’d visited The Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose well-publicized recent gift in modern art revitalizes it with new energy.

That energy is palpable inside and all around. The shady sculpture gardens along the Schuylkill River give way to the busy Boathouse Row where joggers, bikers, and skaters call out “left!” so unsuspecting and distracted pedestrians like myself will move over. But I’m busy snapping pictures of cherry blossoms and rowers on the water, so after about a dozen near misses, I find myself meandering through the Museum gardens between races. There’s a formal wedding underway in one of the outdoor pavilions. I love the contrast of events and smile when the bride concurs by snagging a random jogger to pose with her for the photographer.

Inside, the grand foyer offers cool respite from the bright sun as musicians set up for an evening jazz concert open to members and visitors. The museum conveniently offers a two-day pass. As long as I wear the bright green tin pin they give me, I can come and go as I wish. I like my pin. I attach it prominently on my collar; some things haven’t changed since I was a kid. Once admitted to these hallowed halls, the bustling outdoor activity yields to a peaceful serenity. I make my way through the American artists wing first, barely pausing at some of the angst-ridden twenty-first century pieces that clash with my worldview today. There’s a long corridor with blank walls, and as I’m thinking what a waste of art real estate, I round the corner into another room.

No wasted space here! Rather, the room is filled with beautifully lit (I’m all about the lighting) period pieces, artifacts and furniture displayed in context of one another, such as portraits over mantles and landscapes in parlor settings. One painting, “Staircase Group” by Charles Willson Peale, built into a stairway in a convincing trompe d’oeil, makes me do a double-take. Framed on the wall next to it is the copperplate engraved “Admission Ticket to Peale’s Museum“, which is depicted in “Staircase Group” as if it’s just fallen from one of his son’s pockets, waiting for the viewer to pick it up and follow the boys inside. Art really works when it makes you feel or want to do something.

And that’s an artist’s greatest gift to us; when talent manifests through the ability to distill complex ideas and concepts into singular reactions. They are not singular in that they evoke one emotion, but rather affect us through the directness with which we immediately synthesize myriad impressions that may be hard to articulate. We are transfixed, staring at a piece, taking it in, perhaps just momentarily. But a moment is all it takes. I suspect that more often than not, we’re transformed when our imaginations integrate what we see with our own personal experience. Whether it’s at the forefront of our consciousness or not. That makes art relevant.

That’s why the furniture, artifacts, and paintings in context make it easy to imagine American homes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One such piece, an arresting burled walnut cabinet by Guiseppe Ferrari, is reminiscent of by-gone craftsmanship in its intricate carvings and detail. You won’t find anything like it in the furniture catalogs that come to the house, but it would still be an unmistakable statement of opulence in any home today. Along with the furnishing are wall-to-wall cases of silver serving sets, displays of engraved personal miscellany such as flasks, shoe buckles, brooches and hairpins. All lovely, but it’s the eclectic collection of silver spoons that makes me get close enough to leave a nose smudge on the glass: Is Emaline’s telltale spoon among them?

Emaline’s monogrammed spoon dips into the “House Key” story several times, first in Chapter 35: Runaway, in which it tacitly seals a deal between Emaline and King, irrevocably forcing their conflicting worlds to cross over. The spoon appears most notably in Chapter 37: Cannon Ball, when Jordan and Emaline find themselves scrambling as Civil War artillery blasts all around them. Like the spoons in the glass case, the one in “House Key“ survives to the present day, as rich and relevant in its history as any other artifact in the room.

There are more Civil War reminders throughout the museum, like Winslow Homer’s “Sounding Reveille” that was painted in oil circa 1871, depicting young buglers and drummers. They could easily have been the ones that wake Jordan into action at the opening of Chapter 37: Cannon Ball. Nearby hang wood engravings depicting more scenes of the Civil War, one a composition also by Winslow Homer titled, “The Army of the Potomac — A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty” and “The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863,” a composition by Thomas Nast. Both engravings appeared in Harper’s Weekly magazine, New York, on November 15, 1862 and January 24, 1863, respectively.

I think of Emaline’s charmed life — before the war literally rolls down her road and upends her world — as I stare at Thomas Eakins’s vivid oil on canvas, “A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand)” dated 1879-80. Along the wall, another reminder of my intended purpose today comes from Eakins’s tranquil rowers as they gaze at me watching them from the shore in “The Pair-Oared Shell” of 1872. Quietly focused in subdued tones, they urge me to go back outside and catch the regatta on this beautiful May morning of 2015.