Photo Credit: The New York Historical & John Quidor (1801–1881), The Money Diggers, 1832. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley Martin, 48.171. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Explore the life and work of John Quidor, a visionary but historically overlooked artist whose paintings are steeped in the Netherlandish lore of New York’s Hudson Valley.
When The New York Historical began, its founders feared that “without the aid of original records and authentic documents, history will be nothing more than a well-combined series of ingenious conjectures and amusing fables.” These conjectures and fables, terrifying as they were for historians craving a concrete narrative of the past, were rife fodder for the imaginations of Washington Irving, satirist of the Hudson Valley, and John Quidor, painter who frequently took Irving as his inspiration in creating his offbeat compositions that upended the conventions of both history and history painting. In these paintings, Quidor demonstrated an understanding that history will always, on some fundamental level, remain a matter of speculation and personal interpretation. Rather than lament the elusiveness of the past, he embraced this to address the fantasy and fable inherent to the American story.
John Quidor: New York Stories, the first exhibition of Quidor’s work in over 50 years, explores the artist as a sharply perceptive historian. Uniting his paintings with other artists’ interpretations of Irving’s works, and fire engine panel paintings like the ones for which Quidor was known during his lifetime, the exhibition sets forth the work of an artist who gave visual form to the challenge of remembering the past. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto with Julia Brukx, curatorial assistant
John Quidor: New York Stories is made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
