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Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827 – 1887)
View of the Meramec River near Glencoe, ca.1872, oil on canvas Collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri - St. Louis |
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J. R. Meeker was a native of New Jersey who grew up in Auburn, New York.
He received a scholarship to the National Academy of Design where he studied
with the noted Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand and with the portrait
painter Charles Loring Elliott. Meeker worked in New York and in Kentucky
before arriving in St. Louis in 1859. During the Civil War, Meeker served
as a paymaster for the Union Navy, and his travels on the Mississippi River
introduced him to the river scenery from Missouri to Louisiana. These river
scenes, whether of expansive fields or mysterious swamps, became the staple
of Meeker’s career. After the war he became an active figure in St.
Louis’s cultural scene and his works were heavily collected by area
art patrons.
In the 1870s a group of Mercantile Library members, many of whom had
or were serving on the Board of Direction and also owned works by Meeker,
commissioned the artist to create a painting for the Library. The resulting
artwork, View of the Meramec River near Glencoe, is a glowing
autumnal landscape that reveals both the artist’s stylistic debt
to his early training and his keen understanding of the politics of his
patrons. Stylistically, the work provides a highly detailed foreground,
brightly-lit midground where the majority of the action takes place and
a hazy distant horizon – all characteristic of the Hudson River
School style he learned from Durand. |
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