The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York

Homer Dodge Martin, The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York, ca. 1862, oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1910.9.11
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The iron-ore bed in Craig Harbor near Port Henry, New York, was one of the richest veins in the northeast. Earlier artists had pictured America’s mountain peaks and virgin forests, but by midcentury, the railroads, mines, and oil fields were the new and exciting scenes to paint. From a mineshaft that looks like a bleeding wound, tailings stream down the side of the cliff to the water, where ore was loaded onto barges. Nearby were the blast furnaces of the Bay State Iron Mine Company, which supplied the steel for America’s railroads. Railways in turn carried more raw materials to the nation’s burgeoning factories. Painted during the Civil War, Martin’s canvas quietly asserted the primacy of the North, whose strength lay in its natural resources and manufacturing.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Title

The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York

Artist

Homer Dodge Martin

Date

ca. 1862

Location

Dimensions

30 ¹⁄₈ x 50 in. (76.5 x 127.0 cm.)

Credit Line

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of William T. Evans

Mediums

oil

Mediums Description

oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard

Classifications

Painting

Keywords

Architecture – industry – mine
Landscape – New York – Port Henry
Landscape – water

Object Number

1910.9.11

Palette

Research Notes

1910.9.11.pdf

Linked Open Data

Linked Open Data URI

Videos

Date

November 14, 2012

Information
Transcript

In this podcast, curator Eleanor Jones Harvey discusses 6 featured paintings from The Civil War and American Art exhibition. This episode looks at The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York by Homer Dodge Martin. The Civil War and American Art examines how America's artists represented the impact of the Civil War and its aftermath. The exhibition follows the conflict from palpable unease on the eve of war, to heady optimism that it would be over with a single battle, to a growing realization that this conflict would not end quickly and a deepening awareness of issues surrounding emancipation and the need for reconciliation. Genre and landscape painting captured the transformative impact of the war, not traditional history painting.

ELEANOR HARVEY: Around 1862, the landscape painter Homer Dodge Martin created this work of an iron mine near Port Henry, New York on the Hudson River. During the 1850s that ore was used to create the railroad lines now spanning the country, but during the 1860s during the war years the ore was diverted to the West Point foundry also on the Hudson River in order to forge the giant parrott guns which were so effectively used by the Union Army as their heavy artillery against the Confederacy.

What you see here it is an abandoned iron mine. There is no activity along the shore and the adits or the openings to the individual mine shafts now have rusted tailings stretching down to the shore of the river. Those rusted tailings and those added holes begin to take on the metaphorical meaning of bullet holes as though the landscape itself is one of the corpses similar to those seen in the battlefield photographs at Antietam, which Martin would have seen right about the time he painted this picture.

The idea of the landscape itself as the collateral damage of the war took on greater currency, particularly in the south, and particularly toward the end of the war when Sherman and Grant were laying waste to one city after another in their sieges and marches to bring the war to a close. For Martin, the idea that the landscape is a victim of the war along with those who fought on the battlefields was one of the layers of meaning prevalent in landscape painting during this time. The shock of seeing nature stripped raw and needing years for recovery cut to the heart of the ethos of the American landscape as a new Eden and as a symbolic predictor of America’s future. During the war years the landscape becomes one of the victims of the Civil War.