Luman Reed

ca. 1836

Oil on canvas laid down on masonite

Framed: 37 in. × 32 1/8 in. × 2 5/8 in. (94 × 81.6 × 6.7 cm)

Gift of Joanne Witty and Eugene Keilin in honor of Dr. Linda S. Ferber, Museum Director Emerita

2021.12

This portrait portrays the pioneering arts patron Luman Reed. After establishing a successful dry goods business in New York City, Reed amassed one of the most significant collections of Western art in the early United States. Through his support particularly of contemporary American artists like Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and William Sidney Mount, he helped to shape the cultural landscape of the young nation. As the artist Daniel Huntington recalled, “Mr. Reed was the first American who formed a collection wholly composed of works of our own artists. Besides several portraits he ordered historical subjects, and his warm friendship and enlightened and generous treatment of Durand…and other American artists, gave an impetus to the art of our own country.” Reed’s collection boasts a venerable history at the New-York Historical Society. The collector originally displayed his works in a gallery at his Manhattan townhouse. Eight years after his untimely passing in 1836, a group of investors purchased the collection with the intention of forming The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts. In 1858, that association was dissolved; and its holdings were donated to N-YHS. Reed’s collection formed, in other words, one of the founding N-YHS art collections. It remains one of the most significant early-nineteenth century American art collections to survive intact. In this portrait, the patron turns toward the picture plane and gazes steadily at the viewer. The fine dress lends the sitter a genteel and cultured air, while the soft lighting on his forehead emphasizes a life of the mind. It suggests a man whose vision helped to birth the field of American art. The honorific portrait, painted around the year of Reed’s passing, seems to align with Durand’s estimation of the patron as a man “whose equal we shall never see again.”

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