Vagabond King

After nearly 150 years, the work of a
world-class portrait painter who began his career in Central New York
returns home to prominence and a hero’s welcome. Artist James E.
Freeman spent his early life in Otsego and was commissioned to paint
portraits of three Utica mayors. He went on to practice and refine his
art in Italy during the mid-1800s, and his work is featured in a
retrospective exhibition at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute's
Museum of Art in Utica.

John F. McGuigan Jr. and Mary K.
McGuigan, guest co-curators as well as independent art historians, have
spent the last 10 years exploring the places where Freeman lived,
painted and made an impact, both on the genre of portraiture and on
fancy pictures of the culture of the day. Both met while in graduate
school, Mary studying Italian baroque art and John researching American
art. They looked for a project that would marry their interests and
link the two countries. When they happened upon James E. Freeman, the
McGuigans knew they had found what they were looking for.

“Mary and I moved to Rome for six months
to walk in Freeman’s footsteps and spend the winter in Italy as artists
did in Freeman’s time,” says John McGuigan. They spent the next five
years researching and gathering data, scouring archives and university
libraries across the United States and in London.

Fancy pictures, explains John McGuigan,
were portraits of single figures, usually life-size and of live models,
and were meant to convey sensibility—the development of empathy for the
poor among wealthy art patrons. While this style of painting had not
gained popularity in America, where people preferred dignified posed
portraits of important people, Freeman found that wealthy Americans on
a European grand tour were more likely to spend money on this type of
art while traveling. 

Using beggars, street urchins and the
colorful people of the Italian countryside as models, Freeman found a
niche that he loved and thus chose to remain and continue his work in
Italy. With Rome the center of the art world at the time, Freeman
enjoyed access to the upper echelons of society and even gained the
notice of a few American patrons. 

“When the McGuigans approached the
Munson-Williams-Proctor in 2003,” says Paul Schweizer, the institute’s
director and chief curator, “I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of who
James E. Freeman was. But I found that his connection to Utica, even
that one of the institute’s founding families—the Williams family—were
patrons of Freeman’s, was quite compelling.”

But at the height of his abilities,
Freeman seemed to fade from American thought. He continued to live and
work in Italy, but capricious American tastes in art did not fully
value the “cult of sensibility.” Similarly, works by authors Jane
Austen and the Bronte sisters were brushed aside as sentimental fluff
at the time.

Mary McGuigan most appreciates the
vibrancy and allegory in Freeman’s work, such as that found in the
monumentally sized “Costume Picture,” a sweeping portrait of a colorful
grouping of Italian peasants. “The picture is allegory,” she explains.
“It shows the contact between foreign artists and local models and
their two cultures. There is an old woman, like Michelangelo’s in the
Sistine Chapel, a young woman holding a child—like Raphael’s ‘Madonna
and Child’—and a representation of the three Graces popular in Greek
art.”

Adds John McGuigan: “I think people
should care as much about James Edward Freeman as they care about James
Fenimore Cooper {author of Last of the Mohicans,
among other early 19th-century books based in upstate New York}. He was
someone from the region who used his upbringing and his influences to
become an artist of prominence.”

The events taking place in Italy and the
United States in the 19th century ran a parallel as a fractured Italy
was in the midst of the “Risorgimento” which sought to unify the
peninsula, while the United States struggled through the Civil War,
with division between North and South.

Once again, the concept of the fancy
picture is returning to popularity, says John McGuigan. Through
Freeman’s lasting contributions to the genre and the indelible ties to
Central New York, the McGuigans are confident that Freeman will be
rediscovered by American viewers.

James E. Freeman 1808-1884: An American Painter in Italy is
the first retrospective on the fancy paintings and portraiture of James
E. Freeman and will remain on view through Jan. 17. Organized by the
MWPAI Museum of Art, 310 Genesee St., Utica, the exhibition comprises
20 objects, including 16 paintings and four works on paper by this
little-known New York painter, which span his career from 1835 to 1871.
Museum hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and
Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. For more information, call 797-0000. 

 

“Costume Picture”: An 1857 oil on canvas by James Edward Freeman graces a new exhibit at Munson-Wiliams-Proctor Art Institute.