Acknowledgments

Boone, M. Elizabeth

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Acknowledgments

M. Elizabeth Boone

Vistas de España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860–1914

~This book had its gestation in 1979, when I first traveled to Spain to see for myself the vistas de España. I have accumulated many debts during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since that time, foremost among them to my teachers: William H. Gerdts taught me the value of primary research and allowed me to mine his incomparable library, H. Barbara...

Author

M. Elizabeth Boone

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00172.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16783

Acknowledgments

This book had its gestation in 1979, when I first traveled to Spain to see for myself the vistas de España. I have accumulated many debts during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since that time, foremost among them to my teachers: William H. Gerdts taught me the value of primary research and allowed me to mine his incomparable library, H. Barbara Weinberg taught me to organize my thoughts, and Margaretta M. Lovell taught me to look beyond the field of art history for answers to my questions. Each of these individuals has contributed to my development as a scholar and a person, and whatever merit this work may have is due to their example and influence.

Vistas de España, the book, began as a dissertation for the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. From 1993 to 1995 I had the good fortune to receive a Chester Dale Fellowship and a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum, which gave me the opportunity to work with a superb collection of paintings and colleagues. Conversations in the American Wing about my topic with Mishoe Brennecke, Susan G. Larkin, Thayer Tolles, and Barbara Weinberg made those years especially rewarding. Upon leaving New York for a teaching position at Humboldt State University, I met new friends and colleagues with whom to continue those conversations, among them Christina Accomando, Barbara Curiel, Margaret Kelso, Theresa May, Anne Paulet, Gwen Robertson, and Sheila Ross. Many of these scholars read portions of this manuscript, helping me clarify my ideas and refine my arguments. Karen Carlton, Jennifer Dalsant, Julia Graham, Amanda Johnson, Wayne Knight, and Donna Schafer, also at Humboldt State, provided both moral and technical support on various aspects of this project.

Colleagues at many institutions in both the United States and Europe provided me with access to their holdings and information from their files. I wish to thank, in particular, María del Carmen Millán Ráfales in the archives at the Alhambra; Barbara Hinde and Martha Tedeschi at the Art Institute of Chicago; Mario Finlayson at The Arts Center in Gibraltar; Annette Elowitch at Barridoff Galleries in Portland, Maine; Bruce Weber at Berry-Hill Galleries; Jay Kantor and Andrea Maltese from the Mary Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné; Julie Aronson and Kristin Spangenberg at the Cincinnati Art Museum; Jill Bloomer at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Debra Force Fine Art; Julian Cox and Paul Martineau at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Eric Baumgartner at Hirschl and Adler Galleries; Marcus Burke at the Hispanic Society of America; Jennifer Saville at the Honolulu Academy of Art; George Kornyé at Galerie Kornyé in Dallas; Mary Lublin Fine Arts; Kenneth Lux Gallery; Eduardo Alaminos López at the Museo Municipal de Madrid; José Luis Diez García, Ángel Cuenca Aragon, and Emir Moreno Arcos at the Museo del Prado; Florencio de Santa Ana at the Museo Sorolla, Madrid; Erica Hirshler at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Annette Blaugrund at the National Academy of Art; Mel Ellis at the New Britain Museum of American Art; David Bahssin at Post Road Gallery in Larchmont, New York; María del Carmen Salinero at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid; Ben Rifkin at Rifkin Fine Arts; Elaine Kilmurray, Richard Ormond, and Elizabeth Oustinoff from the John Singer Sargent Catalogue Raisonné; Jack Putnam at the South Street Seaport Museum; Ira Spanierman and Lisa N. Peters at Spanierman Gallery; Deedee Wigmore at Wigmore Fine Art; and Robert Schwarz at Schwarz Gallery in Philadelphia.

For providing all manner of information and suggesting new avenues of research, I wish to thank Ricardo Abrantes, Gerald Ackerman, Brian Allen, Lynne Baron, Pilar Cabañas, Jenny Carson, David Dearinger, Anna Ederlyi and Gene Hoffnagle, Elizabeth Ellis, Eugene and Katherine Emigh, Laura Fattal, Lee Fontanella, Antonio Garcia Bascón, Vivian Gill, Nigel Glendinning, Lynn Hardenburg, Eleanor Harvey, Nancy Heller, Martha Hoppin, Katie Keller, Megan Fox Kelly, Gerardo Kurtz, Janet LeClair, Montserrat Martí Ayxelá, Sally Mills, Lily Milroy, Priscilla Muller, Kimberly Orcutt, Ron Pisano, Sally Promey, Remak Ramsay, Peter Rudolph, Fronia and Marc Simpson, Lois Stainman, Maggie Stenz, Julia Stern, and Joyce Wolf.

In 1998 Hollis Taggart and Vivian Bullaudy from Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York, in collaboration with Laurene Buckley, then director of the New Britain Museum of American Art, offered me a chance to try out my ideas in an exhibition called España: American Artists and the Spanish Experience. Seeing a large number of American paintings of Spain together in exhibition inspired me to continue work on the topic, and I greatly appreciate the enthusiasm and professionalism they demonstrated in the publication of that catalogue and organization of that event.

In 2003 I benefited from participating in a summer seminar supported by the Erasmus Institute and held at the College of the Holy Cross, which enabled me to work on religious themes and anti-Catholicism in American art with Professor Elizabeth Johns and a talented group of young scholars, among them K. C. Choi, Melanie Cornelisse, James (Carlton) Hughes, Jason LaFountain, Miriam Rainbird, Akela Reason, Rhonda Reymond, Kristin Schwain, and Jonathan Walz. It was during this summer that I realized my readiness to go public with this book. Photographs were acquired with the assistance of grants from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies and the Humboldt State University Foundation. Material support from the University of Alberta contributed to the professional appearance of this volume. I also wish to thank Patricia Fidler, Michelle Komie, and Dan Heaton from Yale University Press for believing in this book and shepherding it through the process.

Like Émile Verhearen and Darío Regoyos, who strove to understand Spain from the combined perspective of a foreigner and a native, I have tried to collaborate with Spanish scholars whenever possible. Two of these individuals, José Pedro Muñoz Herrera and Jesús Pedro Lorente, offered me the supreme compliment of agreeing to join me in cowriting short essays about the American taste for Spanish art and subjects. Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, an American scholar of Spanish Baroque painting, paid me another compliment when she offered to include my work on Americans in Spain in her anthology of texts on the reception of Velázquez’s impressive painting Las meninas. I am proud to be able to call these excellent scholars of Spanish art my friends.

Friends remain for me to mention, especially those who made Madrid a home during a sabbatical year in 2001 and 2002. Thanks to María Soto Gervilla, Silvia Tenenbaum, Isabel Vilaplana Sempere, MariCarmen Vilaplana Sempere and Santiago García Alba, Lourdes Markiegi and Ramón Zúñiga, Manane Rodríguez and Xavier Bermúdez, Bill Little and Shifra Armón, Jesús Tejada, and Adam Zimmerman for sharing in the cañas, tapas, and tertulias that made that year so special. I wish to acknowledge my mother, Claire McCleery, for encouraging me to travel, and my father, John Boone, for asking me (repeatedly) when I was going to finish my book. They, along with their spouses Jerry McCleery and Joyce Boone, have always encouraged me in my academic endeavors. And finally, I want to thank Marco Katz and our daughter, Nathalia, for keeping the journey so lively and fun.

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