Description

International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington, D.C., Published 1975. Wraps, 64 pp.; 27 cm; 40 catalogue entries each accompanied by a plate (2 in color, the remainder in black and white), with a frontispiece daguerreotype portrait of the artist. In Good+ condition. Cover illustrated with a color reproduction of Edmonds' "Reading the Bible" (ca. 1856). Moderate shelf wear to the covers with bumping and creasing along the edges and moderate color loss along those edges; faint scattered spotting to the rear cover; light toning to the inside covers. Binding tight. Faint edge spotting on a few interior leaves. Otherwise unmarked. Exhibition catalogue accompanying the touring retrospective of American genre painter Francis William Edmonds (1806-1863), organized and circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation. The exhibition traveled to five venues during 1975-1976: the Museums at Stony Brook, the University Art Museum at the University of Texas at Austin, the Dulin Gallery of Art in Knoxville, the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, and the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University. Maybelle Mann's biographical introduction traces Edmonds' dual career as a New York banker (Cashier of the Hudson River Bank, later City Chamberlain of New York, and an officer of the American Bank Note Company) and as a painter influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch genre traditions, drawing on the artist's own autobiography and on contemporary writer Henry T. Tuckerman. The annotated catalogue treats forty works (paintings, oil sketches, and drawings) with extended commentary on each piece, and concludes with a bibliography of primary documents, secondary works, and period periodicals. Lenders include the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Columbia County Historical Society at Kinderhook, and several Edmonds family descendants.