"Framed! Investigating the Painted Past" Showcases Society Painting Collection

In 1854, when the Wisconsin Historical Society began to build its collections in earnest under the leadership of its first director Lyman Copeland Draper, he made "reliable portraits" of "conspicuous men of the age" and landscapes that memorialized significant historical events major collecting priorities. Now, as the Society approaches its 150th anniversary of collecting paintings, the Wisconsin Historical Museum will mount an exhibit of sixteen paintings selected from the museum's collection that now includes more than 400 pieces. "Framed! Investigating the Painted Past" opens Friday, August 15, at the museum, 30 North Carroll Street, on Madison's Capitol Square. The exhibit will go far beyond simply mounting the paintings for public viewing. Rather, it will seek to explore the stories behind the paintings to reveal clues to the inspiration and influences that affected each artist's work. The exhibit runs through July 24, 2004.

"The exhibit seeks to inspire people to think of historical paintings as more than mere illustrations and to find meaning in them that goes beyond their aesthetic qualities," says exhibit curator Joe Kapler. "'Framed!' seeks to look beyond the face value of each piece through historical investigation so that each painting is seen as a window to the past," says Kapler. Each painting will be exhibited along with a flip book of pages containing historical photographs, maps, newspaper articles, period illustrations and other elements that provide a contextual background for the painting. Some of the paintings will be exhibited along with three-dimensional artifacts, a few of which appear in the paintings themselves.

Two prominent and prolific Milwaukee artists, Samuel Marsden Brookes and his partner Thomas Stevenson, were among the artists commissioned by the Society to begin establishing the painting collection, and four of their paintings included in the exhibit illustrate Draper's vision. Two are oil portraits of Morgan L. Martin of Green Bay and James H. Lockwood of Prairie du Chien, both prominent leaders in territorial and early state government. Two others show the breadth of the early collecting done at Draper's behest: an oil portrait of Iometah, a prominent Menomonee chief who served in the War of 1812; and an oil landscape of the Pecatonica Battleground, one of a trio of Black Hawk War sites painted by Brookes and Stevenson.

Other paintings included in the exhibit span a range from 1838 to 1998. The earliest is an oil portrait of Florantha Thompson Sproat, wife of an Apostle Islands missionary. The most recent is a painting titled "Trabajando En El Campo (Working in the Fields)" done from memory by Seferina Contreras Klinger, a scene that depicts the artist's grandmother and uncle picking cucumbers in a Wautoma field in the 1960s.

Momentous events in Wisconsin history are also represented, including Edwin Willard Deming's 1904 "Landfall of Jean Nicolet," depicting the French explorer's arrival on Wisconsin soil in 1634, and Mel Kishner's dramatic representation of the Oct. 8, 1871, Peshtigo Fire. His 1968 painting, "Peshtigo Fire I: Refuge in a Field," shows a family huddled together in an open field with flames from the devastating fire surrounding them.

An 1876 oil portrait of Madison native Vinnie Ream by George Caleb Bingham best demonstrates how "Framed!" uses artifacts from the museum's collections to give deeper meaning to the paintings. Ream stirred controversy when, as a young 18-year-old female, she was selected to receive the federal commission to sculpt the full-length statue of President Abraham Lincoln that still stands in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. Her portrait shows the young sculptress, with the Capitol dome in the distant background, posed with a harp she bought in Paris in 1869. Exhibited along with her portrait is that very harp, one of several artifacts in the museum's holdings relating to the life and career of the celebrated artist, including three of her sculptures.