SAN MARINO, CA.- Taxes, rent, economic depression, and financial inequity are the subject matter of the 27 visually provocative paintings and seven works on paper assembled for “Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art,” on view at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens through May 30, 2011. Organized jointly by The Huntington and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, the exhibition challenges conventional wisdom about the period. Although the late 19th century is identified artistically with leisure-laden landscapes, abundant still lifes, and class-conscious official portraits, American artists working in a variety of stylistic idioms also turned their attention to the financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. The 34 works in “Taxing Visions,” which are on loan from 31 museums and private collections, demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn.

A diverse group of 29 artists is represented in the exhibition, including William Michael Harnett (1848–1892), George Inness (1825–1894), Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Some worked in traditional academic styles and others in proto-modernist modes of Impressionism and Tonalism, depicting people from every income level and geographic region of the country struggling to make ends meet—from the robber barons of Wall Street to homeless children hawking newspapers, as well as those who struck out for the West in vain hope of improving their circumstances. Installed in the Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing of The Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, the works relate closely to The Huntington’s permanent installation in the same building.

“This exhibition sets our canvases by Harnett, Johnson, and others in the American art galleries in their social and economic context,” said John Murdoch, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections at The Huntington. “But it also celebrates the benefits of academic collaboration. The curators have created a thought-provoking experience for visitors with carefully selected examples illuminating a theme that’s at once timely and timeless.”

Kevin Murphy, the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at The Huntington, and Leo Mazow, the former curator of American art at the Palmer Museum and now associate professor of art history at the University of Arkansas, co-curated “Taxing Visions” and co-wrote the accompanying catalog.

“Leo and I had a longstanding academic interest in this neglected field, and are thrilled to finally bring it before the wider public,” said Murphy. “Coincidentally, as we were working on the exhibition, the United States experienced its most dramatic economic downturn in decades, and the topic became especially timely.”

“Taxing Visions” had its genesis in a chapter in Mazow’s 1996 doctoral dissertation on Inness. Mazow hoped one day to examine how financial hardship played out in the work of Inness’ contemporaries. Murphy wrote a dissertation on just that topic in 2005, as well as examining several components of the marketing and patronage—the “business”—of American art in the late Nineteenth century. In “Taxing Visions,” Mazow and Murphy explore the intersections of art and money and the hopelessness that arose amid the increasing industrialization and urbanization at the time.

One of several painfully touching paintings in “Taxing Visions” is Tattered and Torn (1886) by Alfred Kappes (1850–1894). It depicts an African American woman dressed in rags, holding a lit match in her extended hand, so decrepit she can barely light her pipe. Unlike other artists of the period who sentimentalized African American subjects, Kappes painted with frankness and sensitivity the reality of his subjects’ poverty.

Artists at the time suffered alongside their fellow citizens, and a group of poignantly humorous self-portraits reveals their own efforts to make a living while facing a hostile economic climate. David Gilmour Blythe’s Art versus Law (1859–60) depicts a poor artist who has returned to his rented attic space to find the door padlocked, with a notice of “no admittance” and a “to let” sign. The artist’s shabby clothes indicate the poverty that led to his eviction, and the work is perhaps Blythe’s cynical commentary on the lack of support for artists in the United States.

A reminder of the physical cost of the Civil War for those who fought, Johnson’s The Pension Claim Agent (1867) shows a Union Army veteran in a humble New England home as he confronts a government agent who is there to verify the ex-soldier’s claim to compensation for his amputated left leg. Following the war, scenes such as this played out throughout the northern states as agents visited claimants to prevent fraud. This peaceful scene, which emphasizes the veteran’s supportive family, belies the difficult process many veterans found when claiming their pensions. In 1865 only 2 percent of veterans received pensions; by 1870 the number had only slightly risen, to 5 percent.