Painting the colonial revival.(Current and coming)(Historical Fictions: Constructing the Past in Gilded-Age America)

Many of the interior scenes painted by Edward Lamson Henry between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century are the oil on canvas equivalents of Wallace Nutting photographs. However, since Nutting's photographs date to the early twentieth century, Henry might be regarded as a pioneer of the colonial revival movement.

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Henry's earliest works relate directly to the Civil War. One that has particular weight is his view of Westover, the eighteenth-century Georgian plantation house in Virginia, showing one of the wings reduced to a shell, and an encampment of Union troops nearby. He sketched the house in 1864 while serving on a military supply ship and completed the painting the following year, offering it to the Century Association in New York City in 1866 in lieu of his initiation fee. Concurrent with his view of Westover, is his painting of the John Hancock House in Boston. Its destruction in 1863 had been the catalyst for the beginning of the historic preservation movement. Although the house had suffered from neglect before it was razed, Henry elected to depict it in relatively good condition, as it might have looked when Hancock lived in it.

An exhibition that surveys the two poles in Henry's oeuvre--scenes pertaining to the Civil War and romanticized and nostalgic interiors--is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, through December 30. The show, which includes twenty-one paintings, oil studies, drawings, pastels, and a photograph is entitled Historical Fictions: Edward Lamson Henry's Paintings of Past and Present.

Coming in the wake of the horrors of the Civil War, Henry's depictions of aspects of colonial life resonated with those anxious to reclaim their history and eager to reflect on what life must have been like in those less complicated times. Henry was among the earliest antiquarians and was regarded as highly knowledgeable about colonial American architecture and decorative arts. He purchased antiques for others and for a time was ...