Good evening, and welcome to the Baltimore Museum of Art. My name is Dereck Mangus, and I’m one of the guest curators for Guarding the Art. Tonight, I’m going to speak to you about my selection, House of Frederick Crey (1830–35), attributed to Thomas Coke Ruckle, Sr., an Irish immigrant, War of 1812 veteran, and self-taught painter. But first, let me begin by telling you a little bit about myself…
House of Frederick Crey, 1830–35
Oil on canvas
THOMAS RUCKLE
Born: Embery, Ireland 1776
Died: Baltimore, Maryland 1853
I’ve been a museum guard off and on for over two decades. My first guarding gig was at the Harvard Art Museums, where I worked from 2001 to 2008. One of the perks working for Harvard is you can take free courses through their tuition assistance program, which I did. I received my first graduate degree, an MLA in Visual Art, through the Harvard Extension School.
Unfortunately, I left Harvard right before the recession hit in 2008. After a year or more of looking for work, I reluctantly began guarding again, this time at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was at the Gardner that not only did I first meet my lovely partner, Erika Gislason, who is with us tonight, right over there [point to Erika], I also first learned about VTS, or Visual Thinking Strategies. VTS is what the art education staff at the Gardner use when looking at art. The most basic question is, “What is going on in this picture?” So, before moving on, I’d like everyone, in groups of 2 or 3 at a time, to get right up to House of Frederick Crey and take a real close look. Don’t read the wall text, which I can get into later. People tend to spend more time reading the labels than looking at the art these days. That’s just the “meta-data” of the picture. Ignore it for now. Get up real close. But not too close – I am still a guard! Take it in, and after a few moments, move on and let a few others take a look. “What is going on in this picture?”
THOMAS RUCKLE
The Battle of North Point, Near Baltimore, 1814
Oil on panel
“The British Grenadiers March”
After moving down to Baltimore in 2015 to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I assumed I would never guard again. Yet, here I am. I began working at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2016, first as a Visitor Services Associate and later as a security guard. Though I never thought I’d be guarding for as long as I have, I’m glad I hung on long enough to be offered the chance to participate in Guarding the Art.
When Erika and I moved down here, we chose to settle in the historic district of Mt. Vernon as it felt familiar. The red-brick rowhomes and verdant parks reminded us of certain neighborhoods back in Boston like Back Bay, an area we would never be able to afford. But here in Baltimore, such pleasant surroundings were within our means.
THOMAS RUCKLE
Assembly of Troops before the Battle of Baltimore, c. 1814
Oil on canvas
Wandering the galleries of an art museum is similar to exploring the city. You may not know where you are going, but you keep moving anyway. As with museums, there is art in the city: graffiti, murals, sculptures, and statues. In turn, images of the urban landscape make their way onto the walls of museums.
While guarding the American Wing, I often found myself taken in by House of Frederick Crey. Looking closer, I find a familiar site: the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, the first such landmark in the nation. The Monument stands at the center of my neighborhood, across from where I wait for the bus to take me to work each morning.
The Washington Monument in Baltimore was erected between 1815 and 1829, so it was still fairly new when Ruckle began painting House of Frederick Crey in the 1830s. Anyone who walks through the Mt. Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore is immediately impressed by the massive column, which declares itself like a gigantic white marble exclamation point. Unlike its later, much larger (and more famous) Egyptian Revival counterpart in DC, Baltimore’s neoclassical tribute is topped off with a larger-than-life statue of the man himself, America’s very first Commander-in-Chief, facing south with his right arm slightly raised. Letitia Stockett writes in Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History, “All Baltimoreans are born under the shadow of Washington’s hand and from a hundred different angles we shall see the marble shaft rising against the sky.” This point is considered by police and city planners to be the exact center of Baltimore from which all metrics originate. The top of George’s over-sized crown is thus the zero-degree point of Charm City, or in Stockett’s words, “the true axis of the town.”
Herman Melville celebrates the Monument through the meditations of his narrator, Ishmael, in Chapter XXXV of Moby-Dick, “The Mast-Head”
Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.
With these words, Melville announces the splendor of this first tribute to America’s foremost forefather through classical allusion.
Yet from a certain angle, and with the appropriately immature eyes, the protruding arm “reads” as old George’s penis (as if this was not already articulated by the colossal Doric column upon which he stands) held aloft as though the American Fabius just relieved himself from his perch above the historic neighborhood, waiting for those last few drops to fall. Local filmmaker John Waters parodies the phallocentricity of the Monument (“the oldest dirty joke in Baltimore”) in the opening scene to Pecker when his titular protagonist photographs the statue from just the right angle.
DS MANGUS
Washington Monument, Baltimore, 2022
Digital photomontage
* * *
Inspecting my selection up close in the conservation lab was an edifying experience. The painting I chose hangs slightly too high for me to properly view in the Maryland Gallery of the American Wing, where it is normally exhibited. Viewing it in the lab, free of its frame, was the first time I truly saw House of Frederick Crey, a charming little painting of antebellum Baltimore.
Details I failed to detect in the gallery came to light in the lab. I discerned what looked like a signpost on the corner of the streets at the center of the picture. Scrutinizing that area with special magnifying eyewear, I could just make out the word “Madison.” The painting’s accompanying documents revealed two things: Frederick Crey’s house stood at the corner of East Madison and Van Buren Streets in Baltimore, named for the fourth and eighth U.S. Presidents respectively.
Further, the documents record the fact that Crey was the first Baltimorean to pave the streets of the city with cobblestones. Studying the picture in the gallery, I puzzled over why Ruckle seemed to have stopped painting the cobblestones, when in fact I was witness to an accurate record of 19th-century road work, and a tribute to his fellow veteran’s postwar occupation. This detail resonates not only with my own art, which explores the built environment, but also with the current upgrading of national infrastructure as part of the Build Back Better plan of Joseph R. Biden, Jr., the 46th–and current–U.S. President.
Now, I’m no presidential history buff, but I do love history. When I recently told a museum visitor this presidential connection I made while researching House of Frederick Crey, she lit up and told me that she grew up in Mt. Vernon during the early 1960s, and every home in the neighborhood had a photograph of the Washington Monument and, hanging nearby, a portrait of John F. Kennedy.
Map of Baltimore, showing the battle sites of the Bombardment of Ft. McHenry in the southeast, and the Battle of Baltimore to the west of what is today Patterson Park. Ruckle also fought in the Battle of North Point, which occurred several miles east of Patterson Park. Construction of the Washington Monument in Baltimore began in 1815, the year the War of 1812 officially ended when the Treaty of Ghent was ratified. House of Frederick Crey was painted in the 1830s.
* * *
So, who was Thomas Ruckle? Not much is known about the man. Thomas Coke Ruckle, Sr. was born in Embery, Ireland in 1776. In the late-eighteenth century, he emigrated to the United States, a still fairly young republic. In 1798, he married Mary Chambers Coke (1780–1858) with whom he had two children. Ruckle was employed as a house and sign painter in Baltimore. During the War of 1812, he enlisted as a corporal in Captain George H. Steuart's “Washington Blues,” 5th Maryland Regiment. He fought at North Point and participated in the preparations for the defense of the city. After the war, Ruckle painted two battle scenes: The Battle of North Point, Near Baltimore (1814) and Assembly of Troops before the Battle of Baltimore (c. 1814), both of which are in the collection of the Maryland Center for History and Culture where they are currently on display. He is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in southeast Baltimore next to his son, Thomas Coke Ruckle, Jr., also a painter who was formally trained at the Royal Academy in London.
THOMAS RUCKLE
Thomas Coke Ruckle, Sr., c. 1830
Oil on canvas
Part of the reason why I chose House of Frederick Crey by Thomas Ruckle Sr. was to shed light on this overlooked regional painter. This fits the theme of Guarding the Art, a project which was designed to bring attention to the role of museum guards. The seventeen guest-curators of Guarding the Art represent a diverse group of unique individuals with a wide range of attributes and backgrounds. Some of us have formal training in the arts. Others are self-taught creators. We are chefs, filmmakers, musicians, and poets. A few of us are parents or grandparents, and some of us, like Ruckle, served in the military.
Thank you for listening. I will now take a few questions.
