Lot Essay
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Distant View of Boston, circa 1828, oil on canvas, 8½ x 11½in. (21.5 x 29.2cm.), location unknown
Thomas Cole's View of Boston, painted between 1837 and 1839, was delivered in late 1839 to Joshua Bates (1788-1864), an American expatriate resident in London who had commissioned it in 1830. The painting connected Cole's native country to his adoptive one through the Massachusetts-born patron, who was a formidable financial and quasi-diplomatic interlocutor between Britain and the United States for many years.
Cole was the preeminent member of the founding generation of Hudson River School painters. Through him American landscape painting and American art in general began to come of age during the early nineteenth century. He neither attained nor maintained that eminence easily, however, and in historical retrospect his brooding mentality, his fondness for painterly drama and moralizing, and his forays into architectural practice, essay and poetry writing, and public speaking testify to a lifelong restlessness.
Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moor, England, one of eight children of a woolens manufacturer. Remaining there with his family until his late-teens, he became enamored with Lancashire forests. His American pastor and biographer, Louis L. Noble, reports that during an apprenticeship at a Bolton-area cloth-printing firm, young Cole sought solace from "the rude character of many of his fellow-operatives" in wooded landscapes. There, either alone or accompanied by a sister or by a poetic "old Scotchman," Cole wrote verses, played the flute and took long walks.
After emigrating with his parents to America in 1818, Cole's career search was initially wide-ranging but inconclusive. From those formative years, Noble records two especially interesting circumstances. The first concerns Cole's melancholy temperament and his feelings of isolation in the presence of nature. "The voices to which he listened were the voices of solitude," Noble writes, "the objects of his contemplation rose up before him clothed with the apparel of the wilderness. The native loneliness of his soul and the loneliness of nature embraced and kissed each other."
The second pertains to Cole's lack of early success. Frustrated during a forest hike, Noble recounts, Cole placed a stone atop a stick, intending them as a target for another stone he was about to throw. If he knocked the stationary stone off the stick, he told himself, "I will become a painter; if I miss it, I will give up the thought forever." As it happened, stone struck stone; the episode illustrates the role that chance played throughout his life. By similar token, although intrigued by natural science, Cole seldom undertook close nature study of the sort that his close friend, Asher B. Durand, would later advocate. Instead, nature was for Cole a vehicle through which to express his emotional and intellectual predispositions.
Personalized though they were, Cole's creative proclivities resonated with developing cultural tastes among younger middle class and wealthy persons in the United States. Further, his talents as a painter, his faith in high moral and didactic functions for the arts and the social skills he acquired by his mid- and late-twenties, helped position him to meet opportunity. When, finally, fortuitously, it beckoned in New York City at the end of 1825, he was ready. From that point until his premature death in February 1848, aged forty-seven, he ranked as one of the country's leading artists.
Meanwhile, by mid-1829 Cole had done well enough to embark on his first return visit to Europe since boyhood. Planned for the prior year and one-half, the voyage was funded largely by one of his patrons, Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Boston. Although his principal destination was Italy, Cole passed the first and longest segment of the sojourn in England, mostly in London. There, between June 1829 and May 1831, he surveyed art exhibitions; met British artists, among them John Constable, Charles Robert Leslie, John Martin and J.M.W. Turner; undertook sketching trips; and painted several canvases of various sizes, some publicly displayed, a few of which he managed to sell in Britain; and formed friendships with selected British connoisseurs and with fellow travellers and members of the American expatriate community.
Joshua Bates, who commissioned View of Boston, led the expatriate group. Born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, south of Boston near the Atlantic coast, his forebears on both sides were among the earliest Massachusetts colonists, and his father, also named Joshua Bates, had been a colonel in the Revolutionary army. Young Bates was afflicted by frail health and poor eyesight. These impediments did not deter him from a stellar business career, however, first in the Boston area under William Gray (1750-1825), then the country's largest owner of merchant ships, and from 1816, following repercussions from the War of 1812, as Gray's agent in England. By the mid-1820s Bates, on his own, became affiliated with the London banking firm of Baring Brothers, eventually rising to head its operations and amassing a large personal fortune. Throughout his maturity, although not a diplomat in the formal sense, he was widely trusted on both sides of the Atlantic, and as a result wielded considerable international influence. He remained devoted to his homeland, and during the American Civil War he staunchly supported the Union.
Bates was a cultured, altruistic person. His obituaries and modern biographies alike discuss his benefaction of $50,000, an immense sum, toward the founding of a public library in Boston, and a further gift of $30,000 worth of books gathered by himself for it, during the 1850s. In addition they emphasize his fundamental role, also during the 1850s, in settling various financial claims, many deriving from the War of 1812, by citizens of the United States and Great Britain against the respective opposite governments. His chroniclers agree, too, about his impeccable, sensitive fairness. Apropos the transatlantic negotiations of the 1850s, for example, when disputes arose, Bates, assigned mutually by both sides as arbiter, was said to have "decided between them, plainly, promptly and faithfully; and it is enough to say of his decisions that the voice of complaint regarding them has not been heard in either of the countries between which he was called to hold the balance. ("Joshua Bates, The London Banker," New York Herald, October 11, 1864, p. 5)
Previously, though, in 1838, Bates had performed an Anglo-American service yet more crucial, which, after his death, members of the New York Chamber of Commerce recalled with admiration and gratitude. According to a commemorative pamphlet about him they had printed in 1864, Bates had been instrumental in refooting the finances of New York State, and through it the entire United States, following the American economic collapse of 1837, which stemmed, in part, from the expiration in 1836 of the United States Bank charter. (Proceedings of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, in Special Session, Thursday, Oct. 20, 1864, on the Occasion of the Death of Mr. Joshua Bates, American Partner in the House of Messrs. Baring, Brothers & Co., of London, New York, 1864) With the resources of Baring and Company behind him, Bates negotiated a loan of 1,000,000 from the Bank of England to the State of New York, backed by a further 1,000,000 if needed. In the event, the first million did the trick. Hence, during an interval of profound American economic gloom, Bates metaphorically turned on the lights in London and from there tossed a transatlantic lifeline to his compatriots, which they firmly grasped. The bargain was struck in March and April 1838, helping to secure friendly Anglo-American relations until the American Civil War.
Probably that consummate achievement explains the marble portrait bust of Bates in antique guise carved by William Behnes (1795-1864) in 1838, a lithograph of which is the frontispiece of the Boston City Council's Memorial of Joshua Bates from the City of Boston. (Boston, 1864.) Ironically, Behnes, a respected London sculptor and frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Art, was handicapped in later life by chronic financial insecurity and died penniless: we may believe that Bates counseled Behnes about fiscal responsibility.
We know for certain that Bates did proffer that sort of friendly advice to Thomas Cole, whom Bates regarded as an exceptional talent. But then, Cole, often in need of money, was vulnerable. According to Cole's own notation, published in 1964 by Howard S. Merritt, Cole received an order for "A view of Boston & harbour &c &c from Mr. Forbes'--Milton Hill--To be painted upon my return for Mr. Bates--30 Portland Place London--Nov. 6 1830--Price to be 50 pounds." (H.S. Merritt, "Thomas Cole's List 'Subjects for Pictures,' in The Baltimore Museum of Art Annual II: Studies on Thomas Cole, an American Romanticist, Baltimore, 1969, p. 88, no. 65) Before departing for the Continent, Cole sold "several" (his word) paintings to Bates, two of them depictions of Niagara Falls (The first: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; The second: unlocated), and he left "numerous" (Bates's word) further paintings with Bates as security for a loan of cash. (E.C. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark, Delaware, 1988, pp. 102, 105, 115) Cole and Bates hoped that Bates could dispose of the collateral ones, but no sales took place over the next several years.
For his part, Cole, who now and then travelled to Boston on business and knew artists and collectors there, had trouble fulfilling Bates's objective. Howard Merritt concludes that Cole already painted a Boston view by the mid-1830s, but subsequently rejected it. At any rate, the artist latterly did become disappointed with the inland prospect from "Mr. Forbes'" house. "I have found the view from Milton Hill one that is incompatible in a picture," he wrote to Bates; "--the view is too wide from the field of the picture and a part of it would certainly be unsatisfactory--& that the view towards Boston--it is monotonous & contains not a drop of water to be seen--and of Boston only the State House dome and a steeple or two & those from a distance of 8 [?] miles."
To rectify the problem, Cole paid a quick visit to Boston in June 1837. (The Art of Thomas Cole, p. 193) His notes mention delays due to inclement weather, but at length he found a suitable vantage point near Roxbury, inland among low hills southwest of the city, with clear views of the harbor. There he executed a few sketches. Several weeks after he had returned to New York, his longtime friend, the Boston painter Francis Alexander (1800-1880), informed Cole about a fine prospect of Boston that he had just discovered near Dorchester, farther south and nearer the shore. (Alexander to Cole, Boston, August 25, 1837, Archives of American Art, Cole papers) But Cole presumably had what he needed. At that juncture he may well have been anticipating a return tour of Europe, which would have included reacquaintance with Bates and his family in London. (The Art of Thomas Cole, p. 262)
Cole's repertoire already included topographical panoramas of American and European cities--notably Albany, New York, Hartford, Connecticut and Florence, Italy. The scene he ultimately painted for Bates is still a distant view; Charles Bulfinch's domed State House, Peter Banner's single-spired Park Street Church, and portions of residential Beacon Hill stand out with striking brightness in transient sunshine--an effect familiar from Turner's work--to the middle left, leaving other urban zones to the north and east, including multiple steeples, mostly blanketed in shadow. Flat water surfaces of Boston Harbor and, farther away, ambient peninsulas and islands, extend harmoniously to the right; a sliver of Back Bay, today filled in, is visible at the left. Buoyant clouds, reminiscent of Jacob van Ruisdael and Salvator Rosa more than of Constable or Turner, cleave in the middle while swelling to either side, their gray and white shapes echoing those of the foreground trees below--most of which, characteristic of Cole, twist like latter-day heirs of Salvator Rosa's arboreal actors. The foregound oak directly beneath the distant Beacon Hill looks as though crushed by a giant downward force; get out of my sight line, Cole in effect warned the tree. It complied reluctantly.
The season is late spring, the time of day mid-afternoon, the mood generally bucolic. Everywhere the verdure is green; mullein sprout across the foregound; humanmade picturesque elements are distributed judiciously throughout the middle ground; a curving dirt road, on which a man and woman walk, logically leads to the distant city. Yet the agitated postures of four of the six foreground trees, the bulky boulders at lower middle right, the layered cloud formation above, and the looseness of Cole's brushwork impart an undercurrent of restiveness kin to that overtly expressed in his contemporaneous View of Schroon Mountain, Essex County, New York, after a Storm, 1838 (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio). The shirtsleeved shepherd urging his fluffy flock uphill past the rocks is a clever touch: like modern automobile drivers on rural roads blocked by sheep, viewers both of Cole's time and of ours find themselves amusingly distracted by the pastoral activity.
The prospect on the whole would have been familiar to young Bates as he traveled to Boston from his birthplace in Weymouth. From London he wrote appreciatively to Cole in Catskill, New York on October, 17, 1839:
I have...received the view of Boston which you have been
so kind as to paint for me and it reminds me of home so much
that I long to jump on board a steamboat and walk over the
scene myself, it is tho't also to be a superior painting the
English however never will believe that the color are true to
nature for they have no idea of the difference in that respect
between the old and new country-- (Bates to Cole, London,
October 17, 1839, Archives of American Art, Cole papers)
Doubtless to Cole's chagrin, Bates then turned to practical matters. "I am quite pleased with it [the painting]," he continued, "and request you will draw on me for Twenty five pounds [i.e., $125] at once my reason for stating 25 in place of 50 is that I wish to endeavor to dispose in some way of the numerous pictures I have of yours having been hitherto wholly unsuccessful and there are too many of the same kind for me to keep..."
Among the surfeit of Cole works in his care by late 1839 (a predicament today's collectors might envy), Bates surely singled out the new View of Boston for special affection. Displayed in a drawing room or other social space of his house on Portland Place, the painting signified, much as did William Behnes's portrait bust of him, the "special relationship" that has existed between Britain and the United States since colonial times. In furtherance and facilitation of that relationship, Bates had been and was still to be a pivotal player.
Christie's is grateful to Dr. Gerald L. Carr for contributing this catalogue essay.
Distant View of Boston, circa 1828, oil on canvas, 8½ x 11½in. (21.5 x 29.2cm.), location unknown
Thomas Cole's View of Boston, painted between 1837 and 1839, was delivered in late 1839 to Joshua Bates (1788-1864), an American expatriate resident in London who had commissioned it in 1830. The painting connected Cole's native country to his adoptive one through the Massachusetts-born patron, who was a formidable financial and quasi-diplomatic interlocutor between Britain and the United States for many years.
Cole was the preeminent member of the founding generation of Hudson River School painters. Through him American landscape painting and American art in general began to come of age during the early nineteenth century. He neither attained nor maintained that eminence easily, however, and in historical retrospect his brooding mentality, his fondness for painterly drama and moralizing, and his forays into architectural practice, essay and poetry writing, and public speaking testify to a lifelong restlessness.
Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moor, England, one of eight children of a woolens manufacturer. Remaining there with his family until his late-teens, he became enamored with Lancashire forests. His American pastor and biographer, Louis L. Noble, reports that during an apprenticeship at a Bolton-area cloth-printing firm, young Cole sought solace from "the rude character of many of his fellow-operatives" in wooded landscapes. There, either alone or accompanied by a sister or by a poetic "old Scotchman," Cole wrote verses, played the flute and took long walks.
After emigrating with his parents to America in 1818, Cole's career search was initially wide-ranging but inconclusive. From those formative years, Noble records two especially interesting circumstances. The first concerns Cole's melancholy temperament and his feelings of isolation in the presence of nature. "The voices to which he listened were the voices of solitude," Noble writes, "the objects of his contemplation rose up before him clothed with the apparel of the wilderness. The native loneliness of his soul and the loneliness of nature embraced and kissed each other."
The second pertains to Cole's lack of early success. Frustrated during a forest hike, Noble recounts, Cole placed a stone atop a stick, intending them as a target for another stone he was about to throw. If he knocked the stationary stone off the stick, he told himself, "I will become a painter; if I miss it, I will give up the thought forever." As it happened, stone struck stone; the episode illustrates the role that chance played throughout his life. By similar token, although intrigued by natural science, Cole seldom undertook close nature study of the sort that his close friend, Asher B. Durand, would later advocate. Instead, nature was for Cole a vehicle through which to express his emotional and intellectual predispositions.
Personalized though they were, Cole's creative proclivities resonated with developing cultural tastes among younger middle class and wealthy persons in the United States. Further, his talents as a painter, his faith in high moral and didactic functions for the arts and the social skills he acquired by his mid- and late-twenties, helped position him to meet opportunity. When, finally, fortuitously, it beckoned in New York City at the end of 1825, he was ready. From that point until his premature death in February 1848, aged forty-seven, he ranked as one of the country's leading artists.
Meanwhile, by mid-1829 Cole had done well enough to embark on his first return visit to Europe since boyhood. Planned for the prior year and one-half, the voyage was funded largely by one of his patrons, Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Boston. Although his principal destination was Italy, Cole passed the first and longest segment of the sojourn in England, mostly in London. There, between June 1829 and May 1831, he surveyed art exhibitions; met British artists, among them John Constable, Charles Robert Leslie, John Martin and J.M.W. Turner; undertook sketching trips; and painted several canvases of various sizes, some publicly displayed, a few of which he managed to sell in Britain; and formed friendships with selected British connoisseurs and with fellow travellers and members of the American expatriate community.
Joshua Bates, who commissioned View of Boston, led the expatriate group. Born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, south of Boston near the Atlantic coast, his forebears on both sides were among the earliest Massachusetts colonists, and his father, also named Joshua Bates, had been a colonel in the Revolutionary army. Young Bates was afflicted by frail health and poor eyesight. These impediments did not deter him from a stellar business career, however, first in the Boston area under William Gray (1750-1825), then the country's largest owner of merchant ships, and from 1816, following repercussions from the War of 1812, as Gray's agent in England. By the mid-1820s Bates, on his own, became affiliated with the London banking firm of Baring Brothers, eventually rising to head its operations and amassing a large personal fortune. Throughout his maturity, although not a diplomat in the formal sense, he was widely trusted on both sides of the Atlantic, and as a result wielded considerable international influence. He remained devoted to his homeland, and during the American Civil War he staunchly supported the Union.
Bates was a cultured, altruistic person. His obituaries and modern biographies alike discuss his benefaction of $50,000, an immense sum, toward the founding of a public library in Boston, and a further gift of $30,000 worth of books gathered by himself for it, during the 1850s. In addition they emphasize his fundamental role, also during the 1850s, in settling various financial claims, many deriving from the War of 1812, by citizens of the United States and Great Britain against the respective opposite governments. His chroniclers agree, too, about his impeccable, sensitive fairness. Apropos the transatlantic negotiations of the 1850s, for example, when disputes arose, Bates, assigned mutually by both sides as arbiter, was said to have "decided between them, plainly, promptly and faithfully; and it is enough to say of his decisions that the voice of complaint regarding them has not been heard in either of the countries between which he was called to hold the balance. ("Joshua Bates, The London Banker," New York Herald, October 11, 1864, p. 5)
Previously, though, in 1838, Bates had performed an Anglo-American service yet more crucial, which, after his death, members of the New York Chamber of Commerce recalled with admiration and gratitude. According to a commemorative pamphlet about him they had printed in 1864, Bates had been instrumental in refooting the finances of New York State, and through it the entire United States, following the American economic collapse of 1837, which stemmed, in part, from the expiration in 1836 of the United States Bank charter. (Proceedings of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, in Special Session, Thursday, Oct. 20, 1864, on the Occasion of the Death of Mr. Joshua Bates, American Partner in the House of Messrs. Baring, Brothers & Co., of London, New York, 1864) With the resources of Baring and Company behind him, Bates negotiated a loan of 1,000,000 from the Bank of England to the State of New York, backed by a further 1,000,000 if needed. In the event, the first million did the trick. Hence, during an interval of profound American economic gloom, Bates metaphorically turned on the lights in London and from there tossed a transatlantic lifeline to his compatriots, which they firmly grasped. The bargain was struck in March and April 1838, helping to secure friendly Anglo-American relations until the American Civil War.
Probably that consummate achievement explains the marble portrait bust of Bates in antique guise carved by William Behnes (1795-1864) in 1838, a lithograph of which is the frontispiece of the Boston City Council's Memorial of Joshua Bates from the City of Boston. (Boston, 1864.) Ironically, Behnes, a respected London sculptor and frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Art, was handicapped in later life by chronic financial insecurity and died penniless: we may believe that Bates counseled Behnes about fiscal responsibility.
We know for certain that Bates did proffer that sort of friendly advice to Thomas Cole, whom Bates regarded as an exceptional talent. But then, Cole, often in need of money, was vulnerable. According to Cole's own notation, published in 1964 by Howard S. Merritt, Cole received an order for "A view of Boston & harbour &c &c from Mr. Forbes'--Milton Hill--To be painted upon my return for Mr. Bates--30 Portland Place London--Nov. 6 1830--Price to be 50 pounds." (H.S. Merritt, "Thomas Cole's List 'Subjects for Pictures,' in The Baltimore Museum of Art Annual II: Studies on Thomas Cole, an American Romanticist, Baltimore, 1969, p. 88, no. 65) Before departing for the Continent, Cole sold "several" (his word) paintings to Bates, two of them depictions of Niagara Falls (The first: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; The second: unlocated), and he left "numerous" (Bates's word) further paintings with Bates as security for a loan of cash. (E.C. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark, Delaware, 1988, pp. 102, 105, 115) Cole and Bates hoped that Bates could dispose of the collateral ones, but no sales took place over the next several years.
For his part, Cole, who now and then travelled to Boston on business and knew artists and collectors there, had trouble fulfilling Bates's objective. Howard Merritt concludes that Cole already painted a Boston view by the mid-1830s, but subsequently rejected it. At any rate, the artist latterly did become disappointed with the inland prospect from "Mr. Forbes'" house. "I have found the view from Milton Hill one that is incompatible in a picture," he wrote to Bates; "--the view is too wide from the field of the picture and a part of it would certainly be unsatisfactory--& that the view towards Boston--it is monotonous & contains not a drop of water to be seen--and of Boston only the State House dome and a steeple or two & those from a distance of 8 [?] miles."
To rectify the problem, Cole paid a quick visit to Boston in June 1837. (The Art of Thomas Cole, p. 193) His notes mention delays due to inclement weather, but at length he found a suitable vantage point near Roxbury, inland among low hills southwest of the city, with clear views of the harbor. There he executed a few sketches. Several weeks after he had returned to New York, his longtime friend, the Boston painter Francis Alexander (1800-1880), informed Cole about a fine prospect of Boston that he had just discovered near Dorchester, farther south and nearer the shore. (Alexander to Cole, Boston, August 25, 1837, Archives of American Art, Cole papers) But Cole presumably had what he needed. At that juncture he may well have been anticipating a return tour of Europe, which would have included reacquaintance with Bates and his family in London. (The Art of Thomas Cole, p. 262)
Cole's repertoire already included topographical panoramas of American and European cities--notably Albany, New York, Hartford, Connecticut and Florence, Italy. The scene he ultimately painted for Bates is still a distant view; Charles Bulfinch's domed State House, Peter Banner's single-spired Park Street Church, and portions of residential Beacon Hill stand out with striking brightness in transient sunshine--an effect familiar from Turner's work--to the middle left, leaving other urban zones to the north and east, including multiple steeples, mostly blanketed in shadow. Flat water surfaces of Boston Harbor and, farther away, ambient peninsulas and islands, extend harmoniously to the right; a sliver of Back Bay, today filled in, is visible at the left. Buoyant clouds, reminiscent of Jacob van Ruisdael and Salvator Rosa more than of Constable or Turner, cleave in the middle while swelling to either side, their gray and white shapes echoing those of the foreground trees below--most of which, characteristic of Cole, twist like latter-day heirs of Salvator Rosa's arboreal actors. The foregound oak directly beneath the distant Beacon Hill looks as though crushed by a giant downward force; get out of my sight line, Cole in effect warned the tree. It complied reluctantly.
The season is late spring, the time of day mid-afternoon, the mood generally bucolic. Everywhere the verdure is green; mullein sprout across the foregound; humanmade picturesque elements are distributed judiciously throughout the middle ground; a curving dirt road, on which a man and woman walk, logically leads to the distant city. Yet the agitated postures of four of the six foreground trees, the bulky boulders at lower middle right, the layered cloud formation above, and the looseness of Cole's brushwork impart an undercurrent of restiveness kin to that overtly expressed in his contemporaneous View of Schroon Mountain, Essex County, New York, after a Storm, 1838 (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio). The shirtsleeved shepherd urging his fluffy flock uphill past the rocks is a clever touch: like modern automobile drivers on rural roads blocked by sheep, viewers both of Cole's time and of ours find themselves amusingly distracted by the pastoral activity.
The prospect on the whole would have been familiar to young Bates as he traveled to Boston from his birthplace in Weymouth. From London he wrote appreciatively to Cole in Catskill, New York on October, 17, 1839:
I have...received the view of Boston which you have been
so kind as to paint for me and it reminds me of home so much
that I long to jump on board a steamboat and walk over the
scene myself, it is tho't also to be a superior painting the
English however never will believe that the color are true to
nature for they have no idea of the difference in that respect
between the old and new country-- (Bates to Cole, London,
October 17, 1839, Archives of American Art, Cole papers)
Doubtless to Cole's chagrin, Bates then turned to practical matters. "I am quite pleased with it [the painting]," he continued, "and request you will draw on me for Twenty five pounds [i.e., $125] at once my reason for stating 25 in place of 50 is that I wish to endeavor to dispose in some way of the numerous pictures I have of yours having been hitherto wholly unsuccessful and there are too many of the same kind for me to keep..."
Among the surfeit of Cole works in his care by late 1839 (a predicament today's collectors might envy), Bates surely singled out the new View of Boston for special affection. Displayed in a drawing room or other social space of his house on Portland Place, the painting signified, much as did William Behnes's portrait bust of him, the "special relationship" that has existed between Britain and the United States since colonial times. In furtherance and facilitation of that relationship, Bates had been and was still to be a pivotal player.
Christie's is grateful to Dr. Gerald L. Carr for contributing this catalogue essay.