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This volume is the first in over fifty years to focus on the work, life, and career of nineteenth-century genre painter John Quidor (1801-1881), introducing new audiences to the offbeat, frenzied, and often comically macabre paintings of a visionary but overlooked artist whose eccentric style became formative to American Romanticism.
Born and raised in the small town of Tappan, along the Hudson River, Quidor later lived and worked in the notorious Five Points district of New York City. There, he skirted the margins of the New York art world, splitting his career between painting engine panels for the city’s rough and ribald fire brigades and producing literary genre scenes—the majority based on the tales of Washington Irving and steeped in the Netherlandish lore of the Hudson River Valley—for exhibition at the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Fine Arts. Uniting these two facets of production was the artist’s abiding penchant for overturning convention and upending the exalted stature of history to present the past not as fact but rather as a complex and elusive matter bound to invention, imagination, and selective storytelling. During an age that prized reason and honored the past, Quidor questioned the very reliability of history. His work upends both history and history painting, and this catalogue explores his critical approach to a past that can never fully be known.
This new book interweaves some of Quidor's best known literary paintings—scenes from Irving’s A History of New-York and Tales of a Traveller, as well as the short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—with new objects including a plaster bas-relief representing the second only known likeness of the artist, his sole surviving engine painting for New York City’s early firefighting companies, and a newly rediscovered student copy after Quidor’s lost original for Columbian Fire Engine No. 14.
The catalogue features works from The New York Historical, as well as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Newark Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Historic Hudson Valley; Yale University Art Gallery; and Brooklyn Museum.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition John Quidor: New York Stories on display at The New York Historical from October 30, 2026 through April 4, 2027.
Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto PhD is vice president and chief curator at The New York Historical. Since joining New-York Historical, Dr. Ikemoto has curated Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School (2023–2024), which places landscape paintings by the renowned Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with highlights from New-York Historical’s collection of nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings; Nature, Crisis, Consequence (2022), which examined the social and cultural impact of the environmental crisis on different communities across the United States; Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy (2022), an exploration of public artworks as flashpoints of debate over national identity. Her publications include Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking (2018) and the exhibition catalogues Dreaming Together (2020) and Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection (2021).
Elizabeth L. Bradley Ph.D., is vice president of Programs and Engagement at Historic Hudson Valley (HHV), where she directs programs, curatorial and research for five historic sites. Dr. Bradley's work on Northern slavery with HHV has garnered a Webby Award for Best Educational Website, and she regularly writes and lectures on the subjects of Northern slavery, the cultural history of Washington Irving, and New York City history in general. She previously directed adult program strategy for the New York Public Library's flagship research library and 88 branches. She is the author of Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York and New York: Cityscopes, as well as the editor of the Penguin Classic Editions of A History of New York and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, both by Washington Irving. A contributor to the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York and The Encyclopedia of New York City, Dr. Bradley's writing can also be found in The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Smithsonian. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and Vice President of the Board of the Paper Bag Players, one of New York City's most venerable children's theater companies.