Existing comment:
Charles Ulrich
In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden, 1884
Perhaps at the behest of his German emigre parents, Ulrich studied at the Royal Academy in Munich. There he became a master of the precisely delineated realism that characterized much contemporary German art. This work is one of the first 19th-century American paintings to depict the experience of immigrants arriving in the United States. The artist portrays his subjects with a dignity that defies their humble surroundings and trying circumstances. In particular, the young mother, whose head is illuminated from above as if haloed, suggests a secular Madonna. Ironically, Ulrich sought his artistic land of promise abroad, settling permanent in Europe in 1885. |