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FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO ACQUIRE 19TH CENTURY MASTERPIECE - DE YOUNG MUSEUM DEBUT JUNE 20

New acquisition: Charles Caryl Coleman,
Azaleas and Apple Blossoms, 1879.
Oil on canvas.
71 1/4 x 25 inch

John E. Buchanan Jr., director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is pleased to announce the acquisition of a major masterpiece of the 19th-century American Aesthetic Movement. Charles Caryl Coleman’s painting Azaleas and Apple Blossoms (1879) was purchased in May at Sotheby’s auction house in New York. The painting will make its San Francisco debut at the de Young Museum June 20, 2008.

The painting was acquired through the generosity of Fine Arts Museums Foundation trustee Bernard Osher and J. Burgess Jamieson (through the J. Burgess and Elizabeth Jamieson Endowment Fund for American Art), the Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Endowment Fund, and the bequest of William A. Stimson.

Coleman’s painting will fill a rare gap in the de Young Museum’s 325-year survey of American art, which features the renowned Rockefeller Collection and is one of the finest in the United States. Director John Buchanan notes, “The exceptional breadth and depth of the Rockefeller Collection makes it a challenge to acquire new paintings of equal stature. The acquisition of Coleman’s Azaleas and Apple Blossoms reflects our aspirations to augment all of our permanent collections with masterpieces of the highest caliber.”

Fusing European tabletop still life traditions with Asian objects and aesthetics, Azaleas and Apple Blossoms includes two Chinese vessels—a sang de boeuf (oxblood) glazed jardinière and a blue-and-white vase—which are filled with blossoming azalea and apple branches respectively. The vase evokes the vogue for antique blue-and-white china that entranced both European and American artists such as Edouard Manet and James McNeil Whistler. The floral arrangements, silhouetted against a fine Japanese silk textile, also recall the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement known as ikebana (arranged flower) or kado (the way of flowers). Comparable floral still life paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Ednah Root Curator-in-Charge of the American Art Department says, “Coleman’s objects and composition embrace and emulate Asian aesthetics, which were transmitted in part through Japonisme—the vogue for Japanese art, architecture, and decorative arts. This movement has particularly deep roots in the cultural landscape of San Francisco, which has long served as a transmission point for Asian objects and ideas. This historical interest in Asian art reinforced a respect for the inherent properties of natural materials and encouraged the use of simplified forms, flattened perspectives, and asymmetry.” Coleman’s artful composition, Azaleas and Apple Blossoms, which retains the original gilded artist-designed frame, epitomizes both the aspirations and achievements of the American Aesthetic Movement.

Charles Caryl Coleman

Charles Caryl Coleman (1840–1928) was one of the most prominent artists living in the American expatriate community in Rome in the two decades following the American Civil War. An avid collector, Coleman’s taste and decorative arts collections reflected the influence of the international Aesthetic Movement, which embraced the philosophy of “art for art’s sake” and promoted the beautiful as an ideal in all aspects of life.

In 1883, a writer for the Roman News described Coleman’s studio as “a scene from a fairy play [filled with] antique tapestries and mediaeval paintings and brass lamps and rich oriental rugs, which the magician Coleman has managed to bring together.”

Like his contemporary, the American artist William Merritt Chase, whose painting, A Corner of My Studio (ca. 1880) is already in the de Young Museum’s permanent collection, Coleman incorporated many of the exotic objects in his studio into his still life paintings of the 1870s and 1880s.

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