Luman Reed

Luman Reed ( * 1787 in Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York, † 1836 in New York City ) was an American businessman and an influential patron of the arts.

Life

Reed was born in the town of Green River, the son of Eliakim Farmers Reed and his wife Rebecca Fitch Reed; 1789 the family moved to the village about 30 kilometers away Coxsackie on the Hudson River. Later He rose as a simple seller in food retailing his cousin Roswell Reed start their professional life. In 1815 Reed moved to New York City. On Front Street in the eastern Lower Manhattan, he opened a clothing wholesale and came to great wealth. This enabled him to sit down in 1832 to rest. His last business partner was Jonathan Sturges (* 1802, † 1874).

He was with Mary Barker Reed ( * 1780, † 1869), married; the couple had with Catherine, Charles and Mary three children. Luman Reed - who was always described as a calm, level-headed family man, devoted to the music - died unexpectedly in 1836 at the age of only 49 years and was buried at the New York Marble Cemetery in Manhattan.

Arts funding

Reed was an extraordinary art lovers, and turned in at the beginning of the 1830s as a critical funding and financier of numerous both already established as well as young aspiring painters out. He supported, for example, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, William Sidney Mount, Samuel FB Morse and George Whiting Flagg - and was partly also close friends with them. A special interest he had for landscape and portrait painting, but he collected with the same attention to works of genre painting.

In his effort to establish a national artist -metal culture, which could be compared with the highly developed in Europe, and due to the lack of museums and galleries in the city, he decided to use the assets it had become too partial to assemble a high-class art collection and those of the public to make them accessible. On the third floor of his town house in Greenwich Street, he thereupon sent a two-roomed gallery that was open one day a week for everyone. Since 1829, the meeting of the Sketch Club took place there, from the later of the still existing gentlemen's club Century Association was formed. In the talks, leading artists, writers and collectors came together and discussed current affairs and intellectual problems of art. Reed Durand financed the production of a series of paintings of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which should his fledgling collection quickly gain an historically - relevant claim. At the same time he also had a pièce de résistance - that is an outstanding masterpiece - for his collection in mind. This provided Cole with his cycle The Course of Empire, whose completion Reed did not live. Durand reminded Cole after Reed's death in a letter

Until 1844, the collection remained in the possession of the Reed family, before it was acquired by a group of his former partner and investor, which then the New - York Gallery of the Fine Arts founded to preserve the images permanently. When this had to be closed, 14 years later for financial reasons, the paintings were donated including the New-York Historical Society.