Landscape painting now becomes merely a background foil for photography. This must have been a rude jibe at all the heroic Hudson River and western landscapes that were dominating the public exhibition rooms just then.

This old patriarch with altarlike frame presides disapprovingly over the scene. Could a photographer make a likeness of an ancient patriarch? Unlikely! But now he's almost obscured by the backdrop, relegated to the past.

All the paraphernalia of the professional artist is arrayed in this studio, which, by the way, we know was in a famous artists' building called the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York.

Pictured: Thomas LeClear, Interior with Portraits, about 1865, oil, 25 7/8 x 40 1/2 in., Museum purchase made possible by the Pauline Edwards Bequest.

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