John Quidor
Template:Short description Template:Infobox artist
John Quidor (January 26, 1801 – December 13, 1881) was an American painter of historical and literary subjects. He has about 35 known canvases, most of which are based on Washington Irving's stories about Dutch New York, drawing inspiration from the Hudson Valley and from such English painters as William Hogarth, Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, Joseph Wright of Derby, and George Morland.<ref name="metro">Template:Cite book</ref>
BiographyEdit
John Quidor was born in 1801 in Tappan, New York.<ref name="bio">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His family moved to New York City in 1810. In 1818, at the age 17, he began an apprenticeship with John Wesley Jarvis (where artist Henry Inman was also training), which was the only artistic training he received.<ref name="bio"/><ref name="metro"/><ref name="Dutch">Template:Cite book</ref> The apprenticeship was not a success.<ref name="metro"/><ref name="Dutch"/> Quidor felt that Jarvis did not pay sufficient attention to him, favoring Inman over him, leading Quidor in 1822 to sue Jarvis for breach of indenture, winning damages of $251.35 ($6,244.97 in 2022 dollars).<ref name="metro"/> Because he had to admit that he had received inadequate training, the lawsuit damaged his reputation more than Jarvis'.<ref name= "Dutch"/>
Following his apprenticeship, Quidor earned a living by painting banners and doing decorative work on steamboats and fire engines for New York's fire companies.<ref name= "Dutch"/><ref name="Bauer">Baur, John I. H. "Quidor, John." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web.</ref>
None of his decorative work is known to have survived.<ref name="Bauer"/> Starting in 1823, he began creating paintings based on literary themes, including, his first two efforts, Dorothea and Don Quixote Imagines Melisendra’s Rescue by a Moor, both paintings based on the Miguel de Cervantes novel, Don Quixote; then following with Washington Irving's short stories Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle and James Fenimore Cooper's book The Pioneers. During this part of his career, he took on Thomas Bangs Thorpe and Charles Loring Elliott as his apprentices.<ref name = "metro"/> Of his time working for Quidor, Thorpe recalled that "in all the time we were with Quidor, many months, I do not remember of his giving us anything but easel room and one or two very common engravings to copy. He would absent himself from his studio for days and weeks together. When present, if not painting on a banner or engine back, he would generally lie at full length on the long bench."<ref name = "Dutch"/>
A fire destroyed Quidor's studio, located at 46 Canal Street, on December 16, 1835.<ref name = "Dutch"/> That incident, combined with two major cholera outbreaks in the area and a financial crash in the late 1830s, led Quidor to abandon New York.<ref name = "Dutch"/> He moved to Quincy, Illinois, in 1837,<ref name = "metro"/><ref name ="Dutch"/> and, in 1844, purchased an $8,000 ($299,891.20 in 2022 dollars) farm, which he paid for by painting eight large religious canvases based on engravings of works by Benjamin West.<ref name = "metro"/> These canvases were exhibited in New York in 1847, but their whereabouts and status are currently unknown.<ref name = "metro"/>
In 1851 Quidor returned to New York where he stayed until his retirement in 1869.<ref name = "metro"/> During this period, his style changed. He simplified his compositions and used a narrower range of colors, which he thinned with varnish so that his stylized, nervously rendered figures nearly disappeared into hazy backgrounds.<ref name = "metro"/><ref name="Bauer"/> He apparently stopped painting in 1868.<ref name="Bauer"/> He lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, where his eldest daughter lived, from 1869 until his death in 1881.<ref name = "bio"/><ref name ="metro"/>
CareerEdit
Little appreciated in his time, Quidor was rediscovered as an important figure in American art after a 1942 exhibition of his works at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
His paintings establish a mysterious romantic setting for scenes in which he mingled macabre elements with an earthy humor. Many of his works, such as The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, were inspired by the writings of Washington Irving. Irving's A History of New York gave Quidor the subjects for the four paintings in the Brooklyn Museum of Art: Dancing on the Battery (c. 1860), Peter Stuyvesant's Wall Street Gate (1864), Voyage of the Good Oloff up the Hudson (1866), and The Voyage from Communipaw to Hell Gate (1866). These show Quidor's characteristic mellow and harmonious color, poetic imagination, and naïve humor.
Also in the Brooklyn Museum of Art are his three paintings Dorothea, Money Diggers, and Wolfert's Will. He sometimes painted religious subjects, such as Jesus Blessing the Sick.
Further readingEdit
- Brooklyn Museum, & Baur, J. I. H. (1942). John Quidor, 1801–1881. [Brooklyn]: Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Template:OCLC
- Lost Work of an American Master: Where is John Quidor's Masterpiece? Paperback – January 26, 2023 Lost Work of an American Master: Where is John Quidor's Masterpiece?
GalleryEdit
- WLA brooklynmuseum John Quidor-The Money Diggers 1832.jpg
John Quidor. The Money Diggers, 1832. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum
- QuidorRipVanWinkle.jpg
The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849)
- Devil and Tom Walker.JPG
The Devil and Tom Walker (1856)
- John Quidor - The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane - Google Art Project.jpg
The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858)
ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
- Art and the empire city: New York, 1825–1861, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Quidor (see index)
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