Vale of Kashmir by Robert S. Duncanson

This final episode of our virtual museum road trip takes us to the Cleveland Museum of Art to see the dreamy Vale of Kashmir by Robert S. Duncanson.

We’ll find out how a self-taught American artist made it big and the similarities between this and Place du Carrousel by Camille Pissarro. Plus we’ll discover his connection to First Lady Dr. Jill Biden!

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode theme is “Nocturne in B flat minor, Op. 9 no. 1” composed by Frédéric Chopin. Performed by Olga Gurevich. 
Courtesy of musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/108-nocturnes-op-9/

Vale of Kashmir image
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2014.12

Duncanson info
America’s Forgotten Landscape Painter: Robert S. Duncanson
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/americas-forgotten-landscape-painter-robert-s-duncanson-112952174/

Inauguration Highlights Rainbow Painting by African American Artist
https://americanart.si.edu/blog/inauguration-highlights-rainbow-painting-african-american-artist-duncanson

The Cleveland Museum of Art Acquisition Highlights 2014
https://www.clevelandart.org/magazine/cleveland-art-2015-highlights/acquisition-highlights-2014

Lalla Rookh info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalla_Rookh

Taft murals
https://www.taftmuseum.org/duncanson-murals

Post comments or questions at alonglookpodcast.com

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? This season, we’ve been doing this virtually, at museums with great online resources. 

So join me for a long look at our last stop, the Cleveland Museum of Art!

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at Vale of Kashmir by Robert S. Duncanson

If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/cleveland 

So what do you first notice? 

The enormous mountains rising out of a lush landscape illuminated by the setting sun. They push in from the right side, about 3/4 way up the canvas and almost fill the width of this large composition, that’s about 3 ft x 5 ft. The craggy face nearest us is defined with strokes of clay, beige and terracotta with stark black shadows. A few thin white vertical strokes suggest a narrow waterfall. 

Down and to the left is a lower slope with a collection of ghostly buildings. The structures are very dimly painted in whites, ochres, and tans. When I zoom in, I can see a couple of domed buildings and several towers. 

As the mountains spread across the canvas, angling down a little with distance, they become softer, more pink and lavender, with soft blue grey shadows. Duncanson made the paint thinner and thinner until the distant peaks are barely visible. The effect is hazy, almost dreamy. 

They slope down to meet a landscape filling the bottom half of the canvas. We’re standing near the center of the bottom edge, on the shore of a narrow lake, its water gleaming in silvery blue. Three swans float serenely just off to our left. 

Trees and vegetation spread out on either side of us around the edge of the lake. Grassy clusters in front of us spread to the left into taller, thicker vegetation and trees, which eventually fill the bottom left corner and climb up the left side. There are banana plants with broad leaves, ferns and tall palm trees with skinny trunks and drooping sage and tan fronds. 

The sun has dropped below the treeline on the left, so where we stand is in shadow. The plants and trees near us are painted in deep greens and browns with lighter scattered touches of ochre and russet red.

On our left, the treeline curves back, from left to right, following the curve of the lake, getting shorter with distance until it meets a silvery Islamic-style palace. As I zoom in, I can see the palace has two domes, one taller than the other. The taller one is topped with a spire and to the left of it is a tower, taller than the other buildings. It could be a minaret. Next to that is a shorter building topped with two spires. 

The other side of the lake is illuminated by the soft twilight. On our right, towering palm trees wrapped in climbing vines and surrounded by dense vegetation reach about half the height of the nearest peak. More clusters and clumps of vine-covered trees spread around the far edge of the lake toward the center of the canvas, getting shorter and dimmer with distance. 

They look almost autumnal in the evening light, painted in sage and dark greens, soft mustard yellow and ochre with a touch of rust red here and there. 

Right opposite us, in the middle of the lake, a caramel brown finger of land extends into the shimmering water. A long, tiny boat that sort of looks like a gondola has just pulled up to it, propelled by a man standing in the bow, using a long pole to steer. He’s brightly dressed in a scarlet tunic and what looks like a white turban. The tall bow curls upward and looks like it’s carved with some decoration.

Duncanson has put him right below the middle of the canvas, almost lining up with the tallest peak in the background and three swans gliding in front of us. Several groups of people are walking away from the boat, heading towards a wide staircase that rises gently from the lake. 

They’re super tiny but you can still make out some details. Some appear to wear turbans decorated with tall feathers. A few people shake hands and it looks like one woman is wearing a long white bridal gown and veil. The rest of the party walking up from the boat are dressed in gold, emerald green or scarlet tunics with white leggings or skirts underneath. They look very festive! Coming down the stairs to greet them are groups and couples dressed in white.

As I zoom in, I see more boats at the foot of that palace on the left with more colorful figures heading down to board them. 

The stairs curve in almost a C shape, rising to a tree-lined open area where an enormous fountain jets blue-white water high into the sky. It’s as tall as some of the surrounding trees! Those ghostly buildings on the lower slope rise above it, so maybe it’s the another palace?

Topping the dreamy scene is the evening sky, stretching across the top quarter. It starts off a pearly white on the left becoming a pale sapphire blue on the right. Thin washes of white rise from the peaks forming a hazy mist. The final touch is a handful of peach pink thin clouds  drifting overhead. 

Despite all the colorful, happy activity along the lake, Nature is definitely the star of the show. Humans are more like an afterthought. Those towering mountains, dreamy evening sky and dense plants and trees dwarf their story. 

So what is the story here? 

MUSIC

Vale of Kashmir is one of Robert Duncanson’s most famous paintings and shows part of the story of Lalla Rookh, a Persian princess engaged to a young Indian king. We’ll get into that a little later.  

Robert Duncanson was born in upstate New York in 1821, the son of a Black mother and Scottish-Canadian father. When he was a teenager, he got into the family business of housepainting but really wanted to be an artist. So he taught himself, copying prints of paintings, drawing still lifes and painting portraits. 

He and his mother moved to Cincinnati when he was in his early 20s and he began to make a name for himself. Cincinnati was a big business and transportation center at the time which was probably why it was also a major cultural hub. 

His big break came when he was commissioned by a prominent abolitionist, Charles Avery to paint a landscape called Cliff Mine, Lake Superior. And he discovered he really loved  landscape painting. He became friends with William Sonntag, a well-known local artist who specialized in dramatic American landscapes. Sonntag wasn’t officially his teacher but Duncanson did learn a lot from him about his Hudson River School techniques and color. 

His talent got the attention of another wealthy abolitionist, Nicholas Longworth, who hired him to paint a series of enormous landscapes for his mansion. This was a major commission, the most ambitious at the time. Longworth wasn’t just wealthy, he was well-connected so this put Duncanson on the radar. By the way, the Longworth mansion is now the Taft Museum of Art. 

Duncanson was determined to improve his skills, so in 1853, Longworth and other wealthy residents, paid for him to study in Europe. He traveled to the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

He was really impressed with the landscapes he saw there. In a letter he wrote, “English landscapes were better than any in Europe…” and happily, he felt encouraged about his own work explaining, “My trip to Europe has to some extent enabled me to judge of my own talent. Of all the landscapes I saw in Europe (and I saw thousands) I do not feel discouraged.”

Those trips paid off. When he got back the next year, he began painting enormous, grand landscapes based on his sketches of the views he’d seen. They were really admired and finally brought him financial success. His work was exhibited in New York, Boston, Washington DC and in just a few years, he was proclaimed the “best landscape painter in the West.” At this point, Ohio was considered the West. 

As the Civil War began, Duncanson started traveling and working up north in Minnesota and Vermont, and eventually moved to Canada, where he’d gone to school as a boy. He landed in Montreal in 1863, where he helped start a Canadian school of landscape painting. A couple of years later, he took one of his large works called Land of the Lotus Eaters on tour in the UK, where it was a big hit. The King of Sweden ended up buying it! 

He based Lotus Eaters on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. He got the idea of basing paintings on literature and poetry after seeing English painters do this. And that’s where Vale of Kashmir came from. It’s based on an epic poem by Thomas Moore called Lalla Rookh. 

Lalla Rookh was a Persian princess whose marriage to a young Indian king had been arranged. Like most arranged marriages, she never met him. On the journey to her wedding, she falls in love with Feramorz, a poet in her entourage. who beguiles her with fantastic stories. But don’t worry it has a happy ending, ‘cuz guess who the poet turns out to be? Yup, her fiancé!

Vale shows the moment she arrives in her fiance’s kingdom. If you don’t know it, The Vale of Kashmir is a beautiful valley located near the Himalayas. 

After the end of the war, Duncanson returned to Cincinnati. Vale of Kashmir was painted the next year. Unfortunately, even though he was only middle aged, he began suffering from dementia. His biographer, Joseph Ketner, attributes his illness to lead poisoning he’d have gotten from years of using toxic lead paints during his housepainting career. 

He kept going for a few years, painting and exhibiting, but at 51 years old, suffered a seizure and died a few months later. While his career was tragically cut short, he had become the first Black American painter to achieve success and renown in his lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic. 

First Lady Dr. Jill Biden selected one of his works from the Smithsonian called Landscape with Rainbow to hang in the Capitol Rotunda as part of her husband’s inauguration and it now hangs in the White House. 

OUTRO:

So, I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself. 

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Thanks for joining me!