Dance on the Battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant
1838 (depicting c. 1650)
Asher B. Durand (1796–1886)
Oil on canvas, 32x46
Signed lower center: A. B. Durand, 1838
Gift of Jane Rutherford Faile through Kenneth C. Faile, 55.248

Dance on the Battery, painted in 1838, dates from an important juncture in the career of its creator. Earlier in the 1830s, Asher B. Durand, a founding member of the National Academy of Design, had changed careers from engraving, a field in which he excelled, to painting.1 This shift in focus propelled him into a period of experimentation with different pictorial formats that lasted through the end of the decade. Durand initially embarked on a series of presidential portraits (1834–1836) commissioned by Luman Reed, a prominent New York City merchant and art patron who offered the artist instrumental support during this bridge period. An 1837 sketching trip to the Adirondacks in the company of Thomas Cole, however, inspired Durand to shift his allegiance to landscapes. After a pilgrimage to study art in Europe in 1840–1841, Durand emerged as an influential painter of American nature, inheriting a preeminent position among his Hudson River School contemporaries upon Cole's death in 1848.

On the brink of pursuing this trajectory into landscape, Durand briefly turned his brush to literary genre scenes. It was for Luman Reed that he first dipped into Washington Irving's droll Knickerbocker's History of New York. In The Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant (1835; collection of the New-York Historical Society) Durand portrayed the Dutchman's putative choler upon learning of the Swedish capture of Fort Casimir. Irving served as a resource again for Rip Van Winkle's Introduction to the Crew of Henryck Hudson (present whereabouts unknown), which Durand displayed at the National Academy of Design in 1838. In- cluded in that same exhibition was Dance on the Battery, his third excursion into Irving's work, which he produced for Thomas H. Faile, a local businessman and art aficionado.2 Acquired by the Museum of the City of New York from Faile's descendants, the canvas fuses an episode from Irving's 1809 pseudo-history of New Amsterdam with a lower Manhattan landscape fabricated by Durand. As a double piece of urban fiction, the work reveals more about nineteenth-century nostalgia brought on by the erasure of New York's past than it does about the actualities of a youthful provincial city.

The tableau dramatizes the response of New Amsterdam's humorless director-general to a Saturday frolic on the Battery in the fall, "a season for the lifting of the heel as well as the heart," according to Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving's invented annalist.3 As told, the town's citizenry had, by habit, assembled one afternoon on this southernly tip of land under the shade of a spread of trees to smoke pipes and admire the autumnal dance festivities. The gathering was suddenly spiced by the appearance of a young belle newly returned from Holland, dressed in "not more than half a dozen petticoats, and these of alarming shortness." Adding scandal to shock, a breeze caught the damsel's skirts as she performed a jig, causing a "display of her graces" and grievous displeasure to the onlooking Stuyvesant.

Preparatory sketches for the painting, which survive in charcoal, pencil, and chalk, demonstrate Durand's efforts to integrate the multiple figures of the composition into the background landscape and to refine the individual gestures of the cavorting dancers and riveted bystanders.4 Transported into this canvas from his 1835 romp into Knickerbocker's History are the recognizable figures of the rotund trumpeter Anthony Van Corlaer (standing at left with his instrument), who officiated as Stuyvesant's high chamberlain, and (seated at center) the peg-legged potentate of the painting's title. According to later hearsay, the model for the dark, dour caricature of Stuyvesant was Luman Reed.5 The artist's son, however, vouched for the painting's wholly "imaginary" genesis. Durand's portrayal of Stuyvesant certainly accords with the "Great Peter" described by Irving's hypothetical historian as being armed with "ominous walking-stick" and "a countenance sufficient to petrify a millstone." Durand's bright, clear palette (restored for appreciation through a conservator's careful cleaning in 1998) also seems to correspond with the afternoon filled with "golden" sunlight and "green lawn of the Battery," as recounted by narrator Knickerbocker.

Irving's fanciful retrospective of Dutch New York was motivated in part by the realization that the modern city he occupied was poised to undergo radical change and that the vestiges of its formative past, already sparse by 1809, would be eradicated by progress. New York's heritage of fires, hill levelings, landfills, and other rationalizing urban developments also left nineteenth-century artists with few physical landmarks to consult when attempting to visualize New Amsterdam. Oral and written histories, a scattering of quaint prints and maps, and imagination were their resources, the last of which informed Durand's apocryphal view of the Colonial-era Battery.

Notes:

  1  Durand was a prolific artist whose sphere of influence was wide. His career has been well documented by, among others, his son, John Durand, in The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Scribner's, 1894), and David B. Lawall, in A. B. Durand, 1796 -1886 (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1971). For additional references, see Museum Archives.

  2  Durand's Dance on the Battery is listed as no. 212 in the academy's exhibition records for 1838; his Rip Van Winkle, noted as "for sale," was no. 78. In the same index, another painting by Durand, Shipwreck, Clearing up after a Storm, exhibited in 1850, is credited as belonging to T. H. Faile, the owner of Dance on the Battery. See National Academy of Design Exhibition Record (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1943), vol. 1, pp. 136, 139. Faile was a partner in a family-owned mercantile firm on Front Street.

  3  The phrases quoted in the following paragraphs are from the 1860 edition of Irving's text; see Diedrich Knickerbocker, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (New York: George P. Putnam, 1860), pp. 405-406.

  4  Several preliminary drawings for the painting survive in a sketchbook (collection of the New-York Historical Society) dating from 1835 -1936. A larger body of related preparatory sketches, now scattered in various museum collections - including the New-York Historical Society, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Karolik Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Free Library of Philadelphia - were assembled for comparison with the Museum's oil painting in the Hudson River Museum's 1983 exhibition Asher B. Durand: An Engraver's and a Farmer's Art; see the exhibition catalogue with the same title (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1983), pp. 54-61.

  5  Painter Daniel Huntington apparently wrote that Stuyvesant's head was a spoof portrait of Durand's patron, Luman Reed, and that the figure of the frightened attendant was supposedly Durand himself. See Richard J. Koke, discussion in American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society (New York and Boston: New-York Historical Society in association with G. K. Hall, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 300-303.