Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827–1889)

Sunset and Moonrise at Maiden’s Rock, 1873

Oil on canvas

11¾ x 23¾ inches

Acquisition Fund Purchase, 85.17.1

Essay by Bill Wittenbreer
James G. Lindell Library, Augsburg College

           Sunset and Moonrise at Maiden’s Rock captures that moment in the summer when sunlight and moonlight share the evening sky.  The artist, Joseph Meeker, invites the viewer to experience this evening on Lake Pepin, a riverine lake on the upper Mississippi, just as he did.  His use of warm muted colors with no abrupt contrasts—along with the hazily sketched shoreline, bluffs, and lake—creates a diffused light across the entire painting that gives it the feel of a warm summer evening.  These techniques also give Sunset and Moonrise a sense that nature is quiet, calm, or puzzling. 

           Meeker worked in a style called tonalism that was popular in the latenineteenth century.  Tonalism marked a break from the Hudson River style of landscape painting, which was dramatic and detailed in its recording of the natural world, and developed along with impressionism in the United States.  This confluence of styles is what creates the time of the day, a favorite motif of impressionist painters, as a theme in Sunset and Moonrise.

           Meeker was very familiar with the Mississippi River.  As a young man, he lived in several cities along the Mississippi and first encountered the river’s swamps and bayous, which would become the settings for most of his paintings, aboard a Union gun boat during the Civil War.  Later he would settle in Saint Louis and travel upriver to paint during the summers. 

           In the 1870s Meeker made several trips to Minnesota, where the newspapers frequently described his activities.  The October 2, 1873, Lake City Leader reported that:

J. R. Meeker of St. Louis and Dwight Benton of Cincinnati, prominent and well known artists, have started for their homes with portfolios filled with painters’ sketches and studies of Lake Pepin scenery.  These gentlemen spent several weeks at Frontenac where they were afforded the most favorable opportunities for producing our matchless scenery on canvas.

           According to the Leader, Meeker was often seen painting from a barge on the river near Frontenac.  He stayed at the Lake Side Hotel, a popular Frontenac tourist lodge, during his Minnesota trips and dedicated Sunset and Moonrise to its proprietor, Frontenac founder Israel Garrard.[1]  The painting remained in Garrard’s family until it was acquired by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in 1985.

           During the summer of 1874, the Saint Paul Daily Pioneer reported that Meeker was exhibiting two paintings “which are probably as fine works of arts as were ever brought to St. Paul” and that “some of his pictures are among the most highly prized in the excellent collections of several connoisseurs.”[2]  A month later, it indicated that “Joseph Meeker has painted a picture entitled ‘Scene in a Cypress Swamp of Louisiana’ for J. J. Hill.”[3]  Then, in the fall of 1874, the Daily Pioneer reported that “J. R. Meeker has been complimented with the order for a painting to cost $1,000 from one of the wealthy lovers of art in the city.”[4]

           Meeker’s main subjects were the southern swamps and bayous of the lower Mississippi, which earned him a reputation in Saint Louis as the “leading landscape painter in the West.”[5]  Among his best known work is a series of paintings based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, which was set in the Louisiana bayous—a location very familiar to Meeker.  But he valued the market potential of upper Mississippi scenes, as well as the demand for art in Saint Paul.  The Daily Missouri Democrat wrote in 1873 that “his pictures of the Upper Mississippi are greatly admired for their faithfulness in detail and drawing.”[6]  In 1873, Meeker had enough confidence in the Saint Paul art market to bring some of the first paintings of the Evangeline series there to sell.  Four years later, when he exhibited five paintings at the Saint Louis Exposition of 1878, three of them were scenes of the upper Mississippi. 

           Meeker outlined his approach to painting in two articles he wrote for a Saint Louis journal, The Western, in 1877 and 1878.  He was great admirer of English romantic landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and, like Turner, believed that “the harmony of lines—contrasts of light and shade and the entire value of the tones” would unify a painting.  This, according to Meeker, “determines the value of the whole work.”[7]  He also considered it more important to interpret nature, or the scene, than to faithfully reproduce it, chastising those who followed Ruskin’s dictate “Go to nature, go to nature.”  He thought those who “delved like galley-slaves” in pursuit of this directive would “find that they had become perfectly familiar with the infinite detail of nature, but had not power to spiritualize her various forms.”[8]  Meeker clearly felt that it was the artist’s duty to interpret the landscape, rather than merely to report it.

[1] Lake City Leader, October 2, 1873.

[2] “There are two oil paintings on exhibition at the store of Metcalf and Dixon, on Seventh Street, which are probably as fine works of arts as were ever brought to St. Paul.  They are from the easel of J. R. Meeker, of St. Louis, one of the most skillful conscientious artists in America.  One represents a swamp scene on Lake Pontchartrain on a sultry mid-day, and the subject is handled with wonderful dexterity.  The colors are of most singular shade and tone, and the scene is very characteristic and interesting.

“The other is entitled ‘Evening Glow’ and represents a most glorious rural sunset scene.  The whole effect, with gorgeous sunlit sky, and the rustic landscape, is charming in the extreme.  Mr. Meeker is spending a short vacation, and will probably visit this city before his return home.  He is well known and appreciated here, and some of his pictures are among the most highly prized in the excellent collections of several connoisseurs.”  Saint Paul Daily Democrat, July 15, 1875. 

[3] Saint Paul Daily Pioneer, September 6, 1874.

[4] Saint Paul Daily Pioneer, October 25, 1874.

[5] J. Thomas Scraf, History of St. Louis City and County From the Earliest Periods to the Present:  Including Biographical Sketches of Representative Men (Philadelphia: L. H. Eberts, 1883), 2:1627-28.

[6] Missouri Democrat, March 7, 1873, quoted in Kathryn Vogt Dixson, “Joseph Rusling Meeker: The Land of the Evangeline and Beyond,” Gateway Heritage: Quarterly Journal of the Missouri Historical Society 3, no. 3 (Winter 1982–83): 3.

[7] Joseph Meeker, “Turner,” The Western (December 1877): 716.

[8] Joseph Meeker, “Some Accounts of Old and New Masters,” The Western (Jan.–Feb. 1878): 77.