Paris-on-Hudson: Artistic Authorship in Victor de Grailly’s American Landscapes

Thomas Busciglio-Ritter

In 1969, a curious picture entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, as part of a major bequest by American banker Robert Lehman (1891-1969).¹ Identified as a Hudson River Scene, the painting, undated and unsigned, depicts an idyllic river landscape, surrounded by green hills, indeed reminiscent of the Hudson River School (figure 1).² Yet the attribution devised by the museum for might appear curious at first glance, as it does not rule out the possibility of a work produced by a little-known French painter named Victor de Grailly. Born in Paris in 1804, Grailly died in the same city in 1887.³ Mentioned in several museum collections, his pictures constitute a debatable body of work to this day. But if only a few biographical elements have been saved about the artist, the crunch of the debate lies elsewhere. Indeed, Grailly’s views of American nature have long been linked to a set of drawings by British artist William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854), turned into engravings in an 1840 two-volume publication on American Scenery authored by Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867). Since Bartlett had completed, in the mid-1830s, a tour of the United States⁴, the conclusion to draw seems to revolve around two options. Either Bartlett had to be the author of both the drawings and oil paintings, or the mysterious painter of the latter, generally identified as Grailly, must have been a copyist of Bartlett’s.

The nature of this relationship was at the center of art historian Mary B. Cowdrey’s own preoccupations, expressed in a 1941 article in which she intended to debunk the claim that Bartlett had painted a large number of undocumented oils.⁵ Briefly mentioning Grailly, Cowdrey depicted him as a talentless copyist with no agency of his own.⁶ By contrast, and in a rare 1974 article focused on the artist, historian William Nathaniel Banks Jr. envisioned Grailly’s American landscapes as composite images, resulting from a combination of different influences.⁷ To Banks, Grailly’s paintings were not copies, but independent reinterpretations of Bartlett’s motifs, sometimes altering significant elements.⁸ Though Banks resorted to connoisseurship⁹, his text nevertheless served as basis for the first, and only to date, monographic exhibition devoted to Grailly’s works, one year later at the Washburn Gallery, in New York City. Conceiving a leaflet for the show, Banks brought up two new suppositions. One is what he felt to be a genuinely “Gallic” tone in Grailly’s views, which he sensed through the figures populating them, “who appear to have strayed from the Bois de Boulogne into the White Mountains.”¹⁰ The other is the hypothesis made by Banks about a possible collaborator Grailly could have completed his pictures with.¹¹ Thus, Grailly’s single-hand on the debated landscapes was now thought to possibly be multiple ones. Such approaches underline the difficulty to establish authorship in that case, in what has become a natural impulse of art history in the so-called Western tradition.¹² The purpose of this article is to precisely show why a pattern of narrow authorship might not be the best option to account for the works attributed to Grailly, as well as for their status among American landscape paintings in the early nineteenth century.

Individuality in matters of attribution primarily comes into question around the idea of school or movement. In the case of the Met picture, the possibility of attribution to Grailly raises, most notably, the notion of collective style. First linked to the French Barbizon school of landscape painting¹³, how did Grailly, then, come to be associated with the American Hudson River School? Like most contemporary artists in Paris, Grailly started off learning from an older creator as part of the latter’s workshop. His instructor was Jean-Victor Bertin (1767-1842), a proponent of plein-air painting, himself a student of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819). Both he and Bertin looked back to Italy and neo-classicism in their respective artistic productions.¹⁴ Unsurprisingly so, Grailly’s French landscapes reprise numerous elements acquired through contacts with the latter. First participating in the Paris Salon in 1831, Grailly essentially displayed scenes of pastoral life reminiscent of another of Bertin’s pupils, Camille Corot (1796-1875).¹⁵ Yet, some of his French pictures seem to employ a different formula. Acquired by the Musée d'Elbeuf, Normandy, an 1831 watercolor of the latter town by Grailly presents an open composition centered on a branch of the river Seine strangely similar to contemporary depictions of the Hudson (Figure 2).¹⁶ The importance granted to the sky and landscape itself places it at odds with many of the principles enunciated by Bertin, which signals a permeability to non-national stylistic influences.

In the case of the Metropolitan Museum oil, one may wonder if an answer to this shift in perception of Grailly may lie in analogies drawn with other works from the Lehman collection, as part of which the work was donated. However, the painting’s so-called pedigree does not appear to have had any influence on its attribution. The endeavor of publishing the Lehman collection in a fifteen-volume catalogue eventually helped shed some light on why these works were sidelined. Released in 2009, the third volume of the series namely listed only two American paintings as part of Lehman’s bequest, both anonymous. The Hudson River Scene at the origin of this study only seems to have been attributed to Grailly for the first time on that occasion.¹⁷ Faced with such interrogation, it seems necessary to consider back, at this point, the very source material used by Grailly to produce his paintings. Published by George Virtue in London, American Scenery, or Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature took the form of a repository of images of nature, aiming at exciting European imagination about America’s wilderness. As such, each picture acted as a miniature promotional advertisement for the country, at a time of transatlantic touristic development.¹⁸ It shall be of no surprise, then, to learn that the publication was quickly translated into three other languages. Working in Paris, Grailly most surely stumbled upon the French version. Its preface made explicit, from the onset, the role of such volume:

“The comparison between valleys and rivers, lakes and waterfalls of the New World and these of the old one […] were advantages only the distant traveler could enjoy. Yet the kind of works among which this one ranks enables he who loves his interior to enjoy the same advantage […]. Seated next to his fireplace, he who is called to a domestic and secluded life, can without much cost enjoy […], and every evening on his table, the wild solitudes of America […]. It is hard to obtain such great enjoyment with so little trouble and expense.”¹⁹

An ode to bourgeois domesticity, it is hardly surprising that the French preface to L’Amérique pittoresque would sound like an invitation to the ears of an aspiring painter. Travel books offered the opportunity for urbane Europeans to expand their horizons without having to physically face up to the perceived ruggedness of the United States. An opinion applying equally to Britain and France, as the two versions offer the same engravings, some of them indeed corresponding to paintings by Grailly. Yet, behind this apparently straightforward influence, one is actually confronted with no less than five different objects in this case: the original Bartlett drawing, the engraving produced from this drawing, the book circulating this image, Grailly’s painting using the publication as its source and finally, multiple painted versions by Grailly himself. Hence, Grailly did not copy Bartlett’s drawings. He copied singular reproductions of engravings after Bartlett’s drawings, even further removed from the originals that Bartlett himself did not pursue close relationships with the six engravers responsible for the transition.²⁰ Thus, Grailly’s pictures could totally be considered original objects, as William Banks himself did in his 1974 article.²¹

The Met picture linked to Grailly renders this interrogation even harder to disentangle. Flipping through both the English and French versions of American Scenery, no similar image appears as possible source for the disputed painting. Another parameter to consider then is the significant popularity enjoyed by Bartlett prints.²² The sheer number of copies made of his designs even prompted the organization of a 1966 exhibition devoted to Bartlett “and his imitators”, held at the Arnot Gallery in Elmira, New York.²³ The show assembled loaned works by numerous painters having based some of their productions on Bartlett, “pirating” him, to use the catalog’s own words.²⁴ Included in the exhibition, The Connecticut River from Mount Holyoke, completed in 1855 by American painter Edmund C. Coates (1816-1871) and inspired by a different Bartlett engraving, underlines how important the degree of subversion of an original design can be. This example is all the more remarkable that Grailly too had produced a painting based on the same source ten years earlier.²⁵ This set proves unsettling in the sheer liberties taken by both painters (Figures 3-5).²⁶ Yet, while Coates was acknowledged as having “adapted” a design by Bartlett, Grailly remained a mere “imitator.”²⁷

The ambiguity at play between recognizing an artist’s individuality and defining a group known as “Bartlett’s imitators” highlights the difficulty to grant each of these artists a proper identity.²⁸ This intricate process may also explain why a picture like the Entrance to the Highlands on the Hudson (c. 1845) held at the Albany Institute of History and Art and inspired by another Bartlett engraving, has not been linked to Grailly, though presenting similar characteristics (Figure 6).²⁹ The possible attribution to another French painter, Hippolyte Louis Garnier (1802-1855), illustrates the art historical tension between the safe option of anonymity and a riskier individual authorship. It also highlights the widespread nature of such paintings. The artistic practice of reprising known American landscape designs seems to have been common in early 19th-century Paris.³⁰ And if artists like Grailly and Garnier focused on this type of works, one could suggest that they might, in return, have been aware of each other’s productions. By the same token, the earliest mention of Grailly’s name on a painting put up for sale in the U.S., in January 1962, seems to be a View Near Elizabethtown, New Jersey (c. 1850). Yet, the work in question has since then been reattributed to painter Régis Gignoux (1814-1882), expressing, once again, the complexity of distinction between different French hands at work on American landscapes.³¹

In conclusion, the very nature of Victor de Grailly’s works seems to resist the need to apply a single authorship pattern to them. Most museums now in possession of the ambivalent works don’t seem to have settled over a single way to express their attribution. If engravings produced after Bartlett’s landscapes had indeed been stripped of their original authorship upon publication, their status might have equaled that of anonymity to artists encountering them, like Grailly. And if his own versions of the landscapes contained subtle variations, one might also be tempted to witness his own artistic agency at play in their creation. In a similar way, attempts at devising a strict attribution for the Met river landscape at the origin of this study reaches a dead-end. The seemingly widespread nature of the practice of landscape painting copying in the early 19th century invites to consider the possibility of a non-professional or even a collective artwork. But what may sound, at first glance, rather frustrating may actually be beneficial. The intricate case of Victor de Grailly’s American pictures might indeed, in the end, compel art historians to reconsider the nature of authorship, whether in design, circulation, reproduction or reception of a given artistic object.

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Notes