New England Art Union

The New England Art Union (c. 1848 – 1852) was established in Boston, Massachusetts, for "the encouragement of artists, the promotion of art" in New England and the wider United States.Edward Everett, Franklin Dexter, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow served as officers of the board. The short-lived but lively union ran a public gallery on Tremont Street, and published a journal. Artists affiliated with the union included Chester Harding, Fitz Henry Lane, Alvan Fisher, and other American artists of the mid-19th century.

The union was organized around 1848, and incorporated in Massachusetts in 1850. The board included Everett, Dexter, and Longfellow, and a mix of prominent Bostonian businessmen, artists, and other notables: Joseph Andrews; Thomas G. Appleton; Edward C. Cabot; Alvan Fisher; Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham; James B. Gregerson; Chester Harding; Joshua H. Hayward; George S. Hilliard; Albert G. Hoit; Jonathan Mason; Benjamin S. Rotch; G. G. Smith; Charles Sumner; C. G. Thompson; and Ammi B. Young. Others associated with union administration included James Lawrence and Thomas T. Spear.

The union aimed to promote excellence in art, to single out top performing American artists, and to educate the public eye. To this end, the board thought to increase the breadth of distributed art in circulation amongst the American public by producing fine art prints. In particular, in 1851 the union offered to its subscribers a copy of an engraving by C.E. Wagstaff and Joseph Andrews of Washington Allston's painting "Saul and the Witch of Endor." The original painting (owned by Thomas Handasyd Perkins) was also exhibited in the union's gallery.

The board considered their purpose as part of a national effort to raise the quality of American visual art, ideally on par with the greats of Europe and the ancient world. "In empires and monarchies every protection is afforded to institutions of arts. Regarded as the harbingers of refinement, and the heralds of prosperity, they diffuse a radiance around thrones, and a lustre on the rulers that cherish them. In our republican land, genius cannot receive this munificent patronage, but, by the establishment of art unions, the sovereign people can stimulate and educe merit under the combined influence of those urgent springs of action -- emulation and recompense. The divines, statesmen, soldiers and writers of New England, fostered by public applause and patronage, have given high proof of their merit, and we regard the Art Union as destined to elevate the character of our artists. Its fostering patronage will prove that, by affording adequate opportunity, New England is as congenial to the arts of design, as the lands which have produced a Michael Angelo, a Praxiteles, a Wilkie, or the Vernsets (i.e. Claude Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet, Horace Vernet)."

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