Cincinnati and the arts. (Current and Coming).(management of the collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum)

Cincinnati has a rich history of patronizing the arts. By 1842 William A. Adams could write to his friend the artist Thomas Cole: "Wealth has engendered a taste for the arts [in Cincinnati], and the inhabitants seem to be peeping out of the transition state, and entering upon one of taste and refinement." After its founding in 1788 the frontier town rapidly expanded, and around the middle of the nineteenth century it had a population of more than one hundred and fifteen thousand, attracted by developing industrialization. Local entrepreneurs amassed great wealth, enabling them to purchase art and luxurious furnishings.

Today, many of the finest paintings and objects created in Cincinnati are logically enough in the Cincinnati Art Museum, which was established in 1881 and opened to the public in 1886. These locally made pieces have recently been reinstalled in fifteen entirely renovated galleries encompassing some eighteen thousand square feet. They form a permanent installation called The Cincinnati Wing: The Story of Art in the Queen City, which opens on May 17. Many of the objects on view have not been on exhibition previously. The installation is arranged chronologically and it emphasizes five major themes: the diversity of the city's population; the importance of patronage in the city's artistic evolution; the rise of industry; the shift from frontier outpost to urban center; and the influence of art education.

Cincinnati is important in the history of art and design in this country. The painter Frank Duveneck was born across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in Covington, Kentucky He studied in Munich where he adopted a dark palette and loose open brushwork and a thick impasto. Duveneck taught at the Ohio Mechanics Institute and later at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He was a major influence on some of this country's most highly regarded painters, including John H. Twachtman, Kenyon Cox, Joseph Rodefer De Camp. and Robert Frederick Blum. Duveneck advised the museum on acquisitions and donated a large group of his own paintings as well as works by others he had collected. In the new installation one gallery is de voted to this important painter.

Furniture was made in Cincinnati almost from the outset, taking advantage of the abundance and variety of wood available. By 1841 there were forty-eight furniture factories, eight bed stead factories, eleven chairmakers, and one desk maker in the city. Cincinnati was home to three English immigrant wood workers--Henry Lindley Fry his son William Henry Fry, and Benn Pitman, who arrived in the 1850s. All three were adept carvers, and Pitman devoted himself to teaching, lecturing and writing on the subject, thereby spreading his aesthetic ...