Art and Photos

Visitors to the Mansion at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park will find a surprising variety of nineteenth and twentieth century art and artifacts. The collection includes household furnishings, fine and decorative arts and family mementos. There is an item associated with George Perkins Marsh in the house as well, a silver-headed cane acquired from his widow. Frederick Billings purchased Marsh's personal library in 1882, out of admiration for him as well as a means of supporting his widowed wife, Caroline, and a year later Billings donated and constructed a new library to house Marsh's collection at the University of Vermont.

The furnishings and family mementos are significant both for their historical associations and their value as examples of American art, design and cultural history. A Tiffany stained glass window in the library, entitled "Passing the Torch," is symbolic of an intergenerational commitment to conservation by the Marsh, Billings and Rockefeller families.

The collection of original paintings and prints in the Mansion is extensive and includes a number of works that were beloved by Billings for their depiction of Western landscapes and natural scenes. Particularly important are the nature and landscape paintings by artists associated with the Hudson River School, because of the School's association with the American conservation movement. As artists celebrated nature on canvas, city dwellers who hung landscape paintings on their walls came to believe these scenes were worthy of preservation. At the same time, writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson revered nature on the page. This confluence of artistic, literary and political attention to America's scenic beauty and stewardship eventually laid the foundation for the creation of the first national parks and helped establish conservation as a national value.

The Hudson River School

Before the 1820s, American artists had concerned themselves with portraits and documentary works depicting important historical events. A few painters had tried their hands at landscape painting, but it wasn't until Thomas Cole arrived on the scene in 1825 that scenes of natural wonder became sought after by art collectors. Cole and the artists who followed his example became known as the Hudson River School, because their early influences came from trips around the Hudson River Valley of New York. The Hudson River School painters celebrated nature above all man-made things and their landscapes sought to recreate the majesty of the natural world and to inspire reverence for its beauty.

After Cole's death in 1848, Asher Durand, an engraver and portrait painter, became the most prominent painter of the Hudson River School. In a series of essays entitled "Letters on Landscape Painting," Durand set out his idea that landscape painters should seek to recreate nature exactly and not alter it in any way.

Other Hudson River painters such as John F. Kensett, Sanford R. Gifford, John Casilear, Martin Johnson Heade, and Worthington Whittredge sought to depict natural landscapes in a similar vein. Heade and Whittredge shifted the focus from river landscapes to seascapes. In the movement's later stages, artists such as Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt expanded the ideals of the Hudson River painters. They painted enormous canvases of dramatic natural scenes in the American West and around the world. Frederick Billings was an enthusiastic collector of Hudson River School paintings, and the walls of the Mansion are a gallery of works by some of America's best landscape painters.

During his time in the West, Billings also became interested in the burgeoning field of photography. He was an early patron of the pioneer photographer Carleton Watkins, and hired him to take photos of mining operations in California. Inspired by the majesty of the Yosemite Valley, Watkins took a series of pictures that eventually convinced Congress to protect the Yosemite reserve for future generations of Americans. Billings acquired a number of Watkins' photographs for his personal collection.

In the twentieth century, Laurance and Mary Rockefeller continued to add to the art collection in the Mansion. The landscapes and other works that line the walls of the house are a tribute to the conservation interests of those who dwelled there over the years.