Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
Local Hero
By Sanford Schwartz
Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney with a Catalogue of His Works
by Linda Bantel and Peter H. Hassrick, with essays by Sarah E. Boehme and Mark F. Bockrath, edited by Kathleen Luhrs
Catalog of an exhibition organized by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 225 pp., $59.95
Some years ago, overly optimistic and a little deluded, I decided to write my own, up-to-date version of S. Lane Faison Jr.'s highly detailed and blessedly opinionated 1958 A Guide to the Art Museums of New England. I got far enough to realize that the job probably could no longer be done properly by one person and to find, along with the expected high points, a number of unheralded masterpieces (or at least works that made me want to know more about this or that artist). High on the list of surprises was William Ranney's Shad Fishing on the Hudson (see illustration on page 18), an oil painting dated circa 1846 in the New Britain Museum of American Art, a collection that includes work from the eighteenth century to the present and has a number of particularly fine nineteenth-century landscapes.
Review, 2084 words
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