Thomas Le Clear - Interior With Portraits [c.1865]

Thomas Le Clear - Interior With Portraits [c.1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

By about 1865 American artists were beginning to understand the implications of photography for the art of painting. This canvas reportedly was commissioned by the elder brother of the two children (James and Parnell Sidway) posing in the skylit studio. The paraphernalia of painting are upstaged by the photographer and his gear and the landscape is a mere prop, not an awe-inspiring view. Yet Le Clear does not simply tell a story of photography's triumph over painting. At the time the painting was made, James Sidway, a volunteer firefighter in his mid-twenties, had recently died in a hotel fire; his older sister, Parnell, had died in adolescence, more than fifteen years earlier. Thus, Le Clear may be lauding painters who, unlike photographers, could capture more than the moment at hand, invent narrative, and even restore life to individuals who had passed.

[Oil on canvas, 65.7 x 102.9 cm]

Thomas Le Clear - Young America [c.1863]

Thomas Le Clear - Young America [c.1863], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

In Young America, Le Clear (American, 1818 – 1882) alludes to the complex racial, labour, political, and financial problems surrounding the Civil War, but softens his message by letting children tell the tale. Each figure in the painting can be associated with hotly debated issues such as immigration and emancipation and with tensions between New York's Republican-majority state legislature and Manhattan's Democratic machine. As a plainly clothed boy makes a speech, another boy seated at his feet gestures upward toward a handbill that reads "Meeting Tomorrow/Young America." Inspired by European youth movements of the 1830s, the Young Americans were founded in the mid-1840s and became a faction of the Democratic Party in the 1850s. They advocated free trade and westward expansion and supported the war for the sake of the Union's preservation, not the liberation of slaves. Le Clear underscores the nation's divisions of many issues in the vignette of the two wrestling boys, one in a blue jacket and the other wearing a white shirt and red vest.

[Oil on canvas, 67.3 x 86.4 cm]