Renwick exhibition brings long-unseen paintings to light

Everything old is new again. Fifty-one American artists from the 19th and early 20th centuries — many of them long absent from the public eye — have recently been resurrected at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in a vintage salon-style exhibition. Paintings are mounted above and below one another in addition to side by side, obliging them to compete for your attention. Good thing, then, that nearly every one of these 70 un- or undersung treasures is up to the task. Slated to remain on view indefinitely, the show features Frederick Waugh’s stunning “The Knight of the Holy Grail,” inspired by Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” as well as Edmund Tarbell’s arresting horseback portrait of Marshall Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of the Allied armies until the German surrender that ended World War I.

While a number of these works draw upon historical, literary or allegorical sources, one need not be aware of their origins to enjoy them on a sensual level. Witness Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1913 “Fisherman at Sea,” a visceral painting that almost lets you feel in your gut the listing of the small boat it depicts as waves crash over its bow. Or check out the elemental menace of Frederick Stuart Church’s “Circe.” A Greek goddess with a penchant for turning her foes into animals, Circe is a natural subject for Church, a Union Army veteran who became renowned for his often allegorical depictions of beasts. The lions protecting Circe in his painting look like they bite.

The salon format is by its nature a lot of everything-all-at-once, but that’s part of the fun, according to SAAM Special Assistant Robert Johnson, who was heavily involved in assembling this exhibition, Grand Salon.

“One of the joys of working on the Grand Salon installation is that in a salon environment, it’s kind of a democratic ideal,” Johnson says. “You want there to be a certain simpatico nature to what you hang, but the whole idea is to show a range of things and give a viewing public a wide choice to make their own decisions. It goes back to that egalitarian notion, starting with the French.”

Egalitarian is the word for it. Even those for whom the name of “La Baronne Emile D’Erlanger” means nothing — that’d be most of us — will marvel at the coiled intensity of Romaine Brooks’ portrait. One might reasonably wonder, however, whether it’s the subject or the artist whose essence is captured here. Regardless, the painting pins the viewer in place, like Brooks’ moody, intense “Self-Portrait” of only one year earlier.

Another of the show’s notable portraits is Nicholas R. Brewer’s undated likeness of William Henry Holmes. A celebrated anthropologist and geologist, Holmes in 1920 became director of what was then called the National Gallery of Art. Nowadays, we know it as the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (The present-day National Gallery of Art opened its doors in 1941, and is not a part of the Smithsonian Institution.)