‘William Pedrick: Survey of the Artist” is Trenton Library archivist Laura Poll’s Trenton City Museum exhibition on view through Sunday, January 15.
“Well-known throughout Trenton in his day, Pedrick’s paintings hung in the state capitol, city hall, the courthouse, and other public buildings as well as regimental armories, colleges, museums, and courtrooms in other cities,” say promotional materials about the exhibition bringing the artist and his work back into public view.
Pedrick was born in 1868. Originally from Mount Holly, he studied at both the National Academy of Design in New York and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
He came to Trenton, opened a studio at the Masonic Temple, and, according to the exhibition notes, “created caricatures of notable local politicians and personalities that graced the pages of the Trenton Sunday Advertiser and his own Acme Magazine. While portrait painting was his favorite branch of art, he was also an accomplished landscape artist, specializing in scenes depicting the role that Trenton played during the American Revolution. An amateur historian, he thoroughly researched his subjects and never shrunk from pointing out the inaccuracies of famous paintings, most notably Emanuel Leutze’s epic ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware.’”
A founder of the Trenton Arts Society and Trenton Art Alliance, Pedrick “strove to make an art museum possible in the City of Trenton. As an organizer of the Trenton Fair Art Club, he helped choose a painting of an outstanding artist each year to be placed in the municipal collection with the goal of making Trenton a place of recognition in the world of art.”
The artist died in an automobile accident in 1927 at age 59, “leaving behind an enormous portfolio of work that celebrated the personalities and events of the City of Trenton.”
Included in the exhibition of approximately 20 paintings and illustrations are Pedrick’s paintings showing Washington crossing the Delaware, the opening of the Battle of Trenton, Washington and his officers planning the Battle of Princeton while in the Trenton-based Douglass House, Trenton founder Mahlon Stacy providing the deed to his land to William Trent, caricatures of Trenton figures, and cartoons.
Yet the exhibition is more than what is on view, as Poll explains in a statement: “When I started working in the Trentoniana collection last year, I started to notice names. One in particular kept showing up in up in random places: William Pedrick. It was not until I found clippings from 1982 about one of his paintings that challenged another very well known painting did I become intrigued about the now-obscured Trenton artist. Who was he to challenge a master?”
The clipping was from the New York Times and focused on Pedrick’s public criticism of German artist’s Leutze’s famous 1851 painting in Germany.
During a 1923 address to the Trenton Historical Society, Pedrick said the work in the collection of the Metropolitan Art Museum was filled with inaccuracies and “charged that in addition to many other errors of fact, the Leutze work had Washington headed for Pennsylvania. ‘The ice is either floating upriver,’ Pedrick wrote, ‘or else the boat is headed toward the Pennsylvania shore.’”
And while Pedrick’s criticism is mild by today’s standards, he ruffled enough art circle feathers that his comments were still news 59 years later.
Yet what interested Poll was something that happened after the artist died. “Pedrick was a well-known city resident and artist of his day and seemed to be a member of every Trenton group or society related in any way to art. His cartoons and portraits captured the likeness of city politicians and personalities, and his historical scenes told the history of Trenton. Despite his enormous portfolio of work that was reproduced in publications and hung in public buildings, it was difficult finding many existing pieces. If there were sketchbooks or journals, they were lost or destroyed after his untimely death. Portraits that were hung in municipal offices were taken down and disappeared over the years. Except for the brief resurgence of his ‘Crossing of the Delaware’ painting, which may have done more harm than good for his reputation, Pedrick basically faded into obscurity.
“By bringing together for the first time several of his works, appropriately in Trenton’s own art museum, a goal Pedrick strived for, it is hoped an interest in the artist will be sparked. Perhaps visitors will remember seeing one of his paintings somewhere. Perhaps his portraits of Lenape Chief Mosilian that hung in the Stacy-Trent Hotel, or the painting the Broad Street Bank commissioned him to do, will be located. Considering there is an artistic resurgence currently happening in Trenton, it is an appropriate time to appreciate one who accomplished and gave so much art to the city during his relatively short lifetime.”
William Pedrick: Survey of an Artist, Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, Parkside and Stuyvesant avenues. Through Sunday, January 15, Wednesdays through Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m., and Sundays 1 to 4 p.m. Free. (609) 989-1191.
Pedrick’s painting ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’,
