HAMBURG.- The Gilded Age is the name given to the period of American history in which oil barons, steel magnates and railroad tycoons amassed huge fortunes and feverishly collected works of art and luxury items for their magnificent new mansions. The portraits of this era are the focus of the second part of the Bucerius Kunst Forum’s America trilogy. The exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the colorful social life of New York’s upper crust at the end of the 19th century. Members of society commissioned many portraits, sparking competition among artists that characterized an entire period of American art history. Landscape painting, ranked as a national art genre prior to the Civil War, lost its standing. Only that which was European was in demand.

Painters who did not permanently reside in Europe – like John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler – cultivated the cosmopolitan habits of their patrons and spent time studying in London, Paris, Munich or Antwerp. Because the new plutocracy did not have portraits of their ancestors, they adorned their mansions instead with portraits by past masters and had their children painted to call attention to their future dynasty. The Gilded Age, named after Mark Twain’s social satire The Gilded Age. A Tale of Today, is associated, unlike almost any other period, with portraiture. The first representative exhibition on this subject, curated by Barbara Dayer Gallati, encompasses 42 paintings, two bronze reliefs and 23 miniature portraits from American and European collections.

Included in the exhibit is Francis Davis Millet's Kate Field, 1881/87. Millet’s portrait of his good friend Mary Katherine (Kate) Keemle Field (1838–1896) won him substantial critical attention when it was shown at the 1881 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. As Mariana Van Rensselaer wrote, it “showed some very excellent painting, … but was showy and striking … owing to the pose as much as anything.” Known on both sides of the Atlantic, Field was an extraordinary woman whose rare combination of energy and intellect was applied to her roles of actress, journalist, author, and social reformer. Her intermittent spells of acting included the female lead in the stage version of The Gilded Age, based on the novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

Also included is Alexandre Cabanel's Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting, 1887. A visitor to Cabanel's Paris studio in 1887 saw this portrait of the American socialite Olivia Cutting (1855-1949) in progress and praised the painter for endowing his sitter with an aristocratic demeanor. Upper-class American women had sought Cabanel’s skills since the mid-1860s; the idea of sitting for a famous European painter augmented their notions of cultural self-worth. This was one of five portraits by Cabanel displayed at the 1894 Portraits of Women Loan Exhibition in New York.

James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of George W. Vanderbilt (1862–1914), the youngest child of William H. Vanderbilt, testifies to the strong friendship between the artist and his princely patron, who was a pallbearer at his funeral. Left unfinished at the time of Whistler’s death, the spectral nature of the figure stems from the painter’s obsessive wrestling of form from a black-on-black palette. Vanderbilt’s pale, oval face emerges from the darkness. The thoughtful, almost distracted expression suggests his refined intellect and the attenuated treatment of his body captures his physical elegance.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing's DeLancey Iselin Kane, 1887 is also present at the exhibit. DeLancey Iselin Kane (1878–1940) was the only child of Colonel DeLancey Astor Kane and his wife Eleanora, whose portrait hangs nearby (4). The delicate white-on-white palette reveals the stylistic influence of James McNeill Whistler. The highly decorative, planar composition is accentuated by prominent inscriptions and the coat-of-arms at the upper part of the canvas, which act as emblems of dynastic continuity. The elegant frame was designed by architect Stanford White, who probably helped secure the commission for Dewing.

On view at the show is John Singer Sargent's Henry James, 1913. The American expatriate author Henry James (1843–1916) was an astute observer of the manners and customs of Gilded Age society, which he recorded with exquisite subtlety in his writings. Sargent’s portraits of the denizens of upper-class English and American society are sometimes considered visual analogues of James’s written characterizations and, as early as 1886, one critic declared Sargent “the Henry James of portraiture.” James deemed his friend Sargent’s portrait of him to be “a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”

Abbott Handerson Thayer's The Sisters, 1884 is also part of The Gilded Age exhibit in Hamburg. The quiet atmosphere that suffuses this portrait of Clara (left, 1854/55–1925) and Bessie (1860–1935) Stillman communicates the refinement and privacy that defined their lives. Although they were raised in relative privilege, it was their brother James, who created a fortune that was rumored to be more than $100 million. Thayer painted the portrait in a studio built on James Stillman’s rural property north of New York City. Neither Clara nor Bessie married and, though they were both reportedly artists of some talent, it is likely that family attitudes precluded their entry into the professional sphere.