New BYU exhibit featuring artwork

To the right of a spacious lobby filled with paintings of the Nativity and sculptures of biblical figures hangs an iconic painting of a humble carpenter healing a man near a pool called Bethesda.For Dawn Pheysey, head curator at the BYU Museum of Art, this is where it all began.

In 2010, the BYU Museum of Art hosted more than 306,000 visitors in an exhibit featuring the life of Christ through 19th century Danish artist Carl Bloch's paintings. The exhibit was titled "Carl Bloch: The Master's Hand."Beginning in November, the BYU Museum of Art will open a new exhibit featuring the works of Carl Bloch and other 19th century painters called "Sacred Gifts: The Religious Art of Carl Bloch, Heinrich Hofmann, and Frans Schwartz."

The painting that inspired it all, the BYU-owned "Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda" by Bloch, which was on display in the 2010 exhibit, will be featured in the new collection as well.BYU obtained the painting, which has become an icon for many Christians, after what Pheysey calls a series of fortuitous events — because becoming the sole proprietor of an original 1883 canvas oil painting is no easy feat.

"It took several hoops in order to get permission to purchase it," Pheysey said.The transaction acted as a springboard for Pheysey's dream —an exhibition of Bloch and other artists' religious paintings."We began going over to Denmark every year and building relationships with people there in the churches," Pheysey said.

That friendship paved the way for what Pheysey called some presumptuous requests — four altar paintings, the centerpiece of many churches in Denmark, and eight paintings from the Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark.While the process for borrowing paintings from other museums is easy, Pheysey said this was a particularly steep request because both the altarpieces and the paintings from the castle are permanent fixtures.

"And so we ask, and it sinks in for a minute and we tell them about the 306,000 people who came to the last show and how they lined up, and how there were throngs dying to see these works," said museum director Mark Magleby. "And they think, 'We love these works,' but then their altruistic feelings take over and they say, 'We'd like to share them with all of those people.'"

BYU's exhibit in 2010-11, "Carl Bloch: The Master's Hand," featured four of Bloch's altar paintings from churches in Denmark, and the upcoming exhibit, "Sacred Gifts: The Religious Art of oil painting reproduction, Heinrich Hofmann, and Frans Schwartz," which opens Nov. 15, will feature eight paintings from Bloch's "Life of Christ" series, located in the King's Oratory at the Frederiksborg Castle museum.

Though Bloch's paintings will be featured again, Pheysey said visitors can expect a different show."This exhibit is totally new," she said. "This time we were able to borrow all the paintings we were not able to borrow the first time. It's the completion of the exhibit."And this new exhibit is making history.

"These paintings have never before been out of the oratory since they were installed ... in the 1860s-70s, and they will not be loaned again," castle director Mette Skougaard said in a press release.Skougaard said the castle's decision to grant BYU's request came as a result of the great importance Bloch's paintings have to the people of Utah.

The 67 portraits on view explore family relationships and record fashion and furniture, and some of his sitters hold things denoting their occupations. Most of these prosperous folks lived in small towns and on farms in New Jersey from 1815 to 1835. Williams also painted some shipmasters and city folk during his three years in New York City, 1828-30.

The best of Williams’s pastels and oil portraits are intimate and penetrating. He has been classed with such folk artists as Erastus Salisbury Field, Ammi Phillips, John Brewster, and William Matthew Prior, who have left us a painted record of the generation who lived in the first half of the 19th century, before the age of photography.

Micah Williams’s style was recognized before he was identified as the artist. When Mrs. J. Amory (Margaret) Haskell (1864-1942) was amassing the most extensive collection of Americana ever brought together by one person (it took Parke-Bernet Galleries ten sales, 1944-45, to disperse Haskell’s hoards of glass, ceramics, silver, and furniture that she did not give to museums), she bought six portraits by Micah Williams. At that time, they had been identified as by Henry Conover. She gave them to the Monmouth County Historical Association.

“By the late 1950’s Monmouth County Historical Association had amassed the largest public collection of this artist’s work,” writes Bernadette M. Rogoff, curator of the Monmouth County Historical Association’s collections, in the catalog for the exhibition. She said she had been working on this project for 20 years and it was hard to limit the number of portraits to just 67.

Because his style changed little, Rogoff finds it hard to date artworks by Williams. Of the 272 identified portraits by Micah Williams only 11 are inscribed with the month, day, and year of completion, and an additional six with the year of completion. Newspaper sheets used as a secondary support for the paper that Williams used for pastels often help date a work. Rogoff believes Williams had access to books and actual art instruction when he chose the life of an itinerant artist. She cites Archibald Robertson’s instruction book, Elements of Graphic Arts, and notes that Robertson started the first American art school (in New York City), though Rogoff found no record of Williams attending the school.

Williams was immediately successful. Monmouth County, New Jersey, was one of his largest sources of patronage. A successful agricultural area, it was excellent for grazing animals and growing fruit and vegetables for the city markets. The descendants of Dutch and English families (Smock, Smalley, Schenck, Dubois, Van Mater, Conover, Longstreet, and Vanderveder) appear in identified portraits as doctors, horse and dairy farmers, orchardists, politicians, militia officers, storekeepers, potters, silversmiths, carpenters, and their wives and children. According to Rogoff’s count, between 1818 and 1821 Williams produced more than 60 portraits of Monmouth County residents. Williams was recommended from one to another.

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