Showing an artistic side

Fort Ticonderoga’s art collection is getting equal billing with the weaponry

Associated Press

TICONDEROGA, N.Y.

Plenty of cannons, muskets, bayonets, swords and other 18th-century military hardware are on display at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York.

Officials claim to have one of the most extensive collections of military artifacts from the 1700s, rivaling those at the Smithsonian Institution and the Tower of London.

But there’s more to see this summer and early fall at the historic site on Lake Champlain than relics from the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.

The fort’s extensive art collection is getting equal billing with the weaponry on display. For the first time since the fort was rebuilt as a tourist attraction 102 years ago, 50 of Fort Ticonderoga’s most important artworks are on display in a single exhibit. They include a painting by Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, engraved powder horns circa 1759, and a portrait of George Washington by Charles Peale Polk.

“You don’t have to go to New York City to see great art,” Christopher Fox, curator of collections, tells visitors to the fort, located in the southeastern Adirondacks 75 miles north of Albany. “You can go to Fort Ticonderoga and see many pieces that relate to various periods in American art.”

The exhibit — titled “The Art of War: Ticonderoga as Experienced through the eyes of America’s Great Artists” — is in the gallery on the lower floor of the new $23 million Mars Education Center, named for Forrest Mars Jr. and Deborah Clarke Mars. He’s an heir to the Mars candy fortune; she’s a Ticonderoga native.

Visitors to the exhibit pass a large oil-on-canvas portrait of Deborah Mars. Once inside the intimate gallery, they see artwork that tells Fort Ticonderoga’s story, from an 18th-century map drawn when the Lake George-Lake Champlain corridor was the focus of warring European empires to black-and-white photographs that capture the fort’s crumbling condition before restoration was started by the Pell family in 1909.

Two items are linked to the pivotal year of 1759, when the British finally captured the fort, followed weeks later by their victory at the Battle of Quebec.

The first is a painting made in 1774 by Thomas Davies, a British artillery officer who was part of the 1759 campaign. The scene shows the British encampment on the southern shore of Lake George. Fox said it’s the earliest known painted image of the lake.

The other link to 1759 is a powder horn engraved with a map showing the British siege works outside the fort that year. Soldiers of the period commonly carved maps and other images onto powder horns during idle hours in camp, Fox said.

The portrait of George Washington painted by Polk around 1790 is part of the exhibit not just for its stellar quality, Fox said. The Continental Army commander and future president visited Ticonderoga briefly during his tour of northern military outposts in July 1783, when he was waiting for word on the treaty that would end the American Revolution.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Cole’s 1826 work, “Gelyna, or a View Near Ticonderoga.”

Considered the fort’s most valuable and important piece, the painting depicts a fictionalized scene of a British officer coming to the aid of a wounded comrade lying on a wilderness outcropping, while smoke rises in the distant background from the 1758 Battle of Ticonderoga.

It’s the earliest known piece signed by Cole, an English-born artist regarded as the founder of the 19th-century American art movement known as the Hudson River School.

The exhibit also features 19th-century line engravings of the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, a favorite subject of artists of the period.

Unlike Europe, where centuries-old ruins dot the landscape, the United States offered few places where architecture from bygone eras could capture an artist’s imagination.

Ticonderoga, with its mountain backdrops and old fort ruins, fit the bill for American artists in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

The core of the fort’s art collection were acquired in the first half of the 20th century by Sara and Stephen Pell, who restored the fort on the site where it stood before falling into disrepair after the Revolutionary War. Pell was a descendant of William Ferris Pell, the wealthy New York merchant who acquired the fort grounds in 1820.

Together, Sara and Stephen Pell spent decades building a collection that went beyond the glass cases filled with weapons and other martial artifacts viewed by generations of visitors.

“We’re most obviously known as a fort,” Fox said. “It’s fair to say a lot of people wouldn’t associate a military site with a place that has a lot of art related to topics outside the military sphere.”

The exhibit ends when the fort closes for the season Oct. 20.

For more information, visit www.fortticonderoga.org, or call 518-585-2821.