Beauty's Legacy, Material Opulence and Personal Excess: Gilded Age Portraits
Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America, a new exhibition on view at the New-York Historical Society through March 9, 2014, explores the critical and popular resurgence of portraiture in the United States in the period bounded by the close of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. Known as the Gilded Age, the era was marked by unprecedented industrial expansion yielding vast personal fortunes. Today, the Gilded Age conjures visions of material opulence and personal excess, yet it also inspired a fascinating chapter in American cultural and social history. With the amassing of great fortunes came the drive to document the wealthy in portraiture, echoing a cultural pattern reaching back to colonial times. A brilliant generation of American and European artists rose to meet that demand.
Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907), James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), 1901. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of James Hazen Hyde, 1949.1
(Editor's Note. Addition information about Hyde from the Frick Collection text about collectors follows. A recently updated article, James Hazen Hyde and the Allegory of the Four Continents, is from the Oxford journal, Journal of the History of Collections, and more can be read about his collections.)
James Hazen Hyde was a businessman, socialite, art collector, philanthropist and Francophile.Born on June 6, 1876 he was the son of the founder of Equitable Life Assurance Society, Henry Baldwin Hyde, and served as the company’s president from 1899-1905. After a business scandal and selling his business interests to Thomas Fortune Ryan, Hyde lived in self excile in Paris from 1905- 1941. Hyde’s art collection of paintings, porcelains, engravings and tapestries was distributed to several museums, including Cooper Union, now the Cooper-Hewitt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Hyde was a founder of the Alliance Française in 1953; chosen as chairman of the executive committee of the Federation of French Alliances in the United States; and, awarded the Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor.
The exhibition features sixty-five portraits selected from New-York Historical’s outstanding holdings. The sitters — ranging from famous society beauties to powerful titans of business and industry — left lasting legacies that contributed to the cultural and economic growth of the nation. Beauty’s Legacy also takes its cue from a series of three important portrait loan exhibitions mounted in New York in the 1890s that were organized for charitable purposes by the city’s social elite. A number of paintings in Beauty’s Legacy were featured in those historic displays and are installed to evoke the late-nineteenth-century viewing experience.
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