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Hart was born into a free Black family in Port Jefferson, where over 100 Black families lived during the 19th century. The precision and clarity of Mount’s brushwork, the geometric perfection of his triangular composition, and the dignity and grace with which he invested his human subjects make Eel Spearing a painting that has few equals in American art.
Exhibition History“Paintings and Drawings of William Sidney Mount,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, November 23, 1968 – January 5, 1969; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, January 18, 1969 – February 15, 1969.
“The River: People and Places,” New York State Fair, The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY, April 22 – October 31, 1964.
“Art of the United States,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, September 27 – November 27,1966, no cat. no.
“Untitled (Mount Show),” Century Association, New York, NY, January 3 – March 6, 1967, no cat. no.
“Painter of Rural America, William Sidney Mount, 1807 – 1868,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 23, 1968 – January 5, 1969; City Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, January 18 – February 15, 1969; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 3 – April 15, 1969; M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, May 1 – May 31, 1969, cat. no. 24.
“Nineteenth Century America,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, March 16 – September 7, 1970, cat. no. 54.
“Untitled,” Executive Mansion, Albany, NY, April 16 – July 1, 1974, no cat. no.
726 “A Century and a Half of American Art,” National Academy of Design, New York, NY, October 10 – November 16, 1975, no cat. no.
“The 45th Annual Winter Antique Show,” Lenox Hill Station, New York, NY, January 12 – 25, 1999, no cat.
“William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life,” New York Historical Society, New York, NY, August 14 – October 25, 1998; The Frick Art Museum, New York, NY, November 19, 1998 – January 10, 1999: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, February 5 – April 4, 1999, no cat. no.
“Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825 – 1861,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, September 11, 2000 – January 7, 2001, cat. no. 28.
“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art,” Fenimore Art Museum, August, 23 – December 31, 2008; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, January 25 – April 18, 2010, no cat. no.
“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765 – 1915,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, October 12, 2009 – January 24, 2010; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, February 28 – May 23, 2010, no cat. no.
“Wild Spaces, Open Seasons Hunting and Fishing in American Art,” Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, October 23, 2016 – January 15, 2017; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, February 12 – May 7, 2017; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, October 7, 2017 – January 7, 2018, cat. no. 44.
“Long Road to Freedom: Slavery on Long Island 1651-1827,” Long Island Museum, NY, February 15, 2019 – May 27, 2019.
“Perfect Harmony; The Musical Art and Life of William Sydney Mount,” Long Island Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, May 25, 2019 – September 8, 2019.
BibliographyCatalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1942), p. 22, cat. no. 59, ill.
Cowdrey, Barlett, Williams, Hermann Warner, Jr. et al., William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. xii, 20, cat. no. 36, ill.
“William Sidney Mount Painter Made Long Island his Italy,” in Life Magazine (June 25, 1945), p. 66, ill.
“Historic Museum Piece,” in Newsday (September 4, 1954), n.p., as “Speaking at Setauket,” ill.
Gaul, Enrique F., El Arte en Los Estados Unidos La Pintura, Vol. 1 (Mexico: Ediciones Gamma, 1954), n.p., ill.
“Four Centuries of American Art,” in Minneapolis Sunday Tribune Picture Magazine (November 24, 1963), p. 5, ill.
Frankenstein, Alfred, Painter of Rural America: William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. Stony Brook, NY: The Suffolk County Museum, 1968), p. 37, fig. 49, cat. no. 24, ill.
Novak, Barbara, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1969), pp. 105 – 107, fig. 5.18, ill.
Howat, John K., Willerding, John et al., 19th-Century America Paintings and Sculpture (exh. cat. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), pp. 61, 62, cat. no. 54, ill.
Frankenstein, Alfred, William Sidney Mount (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1975), n.p, fig. 23, ill.
Soffer, Miriam, “The Simple Joys,” in NAHO, Vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1978), p. 6, 9, ill.
“‘Painter for the Many, Not for the Few.’… William Sidney Mount,” in American History Illustrated (May 1979), pp. 25-27, ill.
Wilmerding, John et al., American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850 – 1875 Paintings, Drawings and Photographs (exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1980), pp. 228, 229, fig. 256, ill.
“The Simple Piety of Everyday Life,” in Express (November, 1982), pp. 40, 41, ill.
Pisano, Ronald G., Long Island Landscape Painting 1820 – 1920 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 20, ill.
Tsuda, Margaret, “Spearing Eels, Catching Flat Fish,” in The Christian Science Monitor (December 19, 1989), p. 16, ill.
Wilmerding, John, American Views, Essays on American Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. xi, 78, fig. 52, ill.
“The Power of Music: A Painting by William Sidney Mount,” in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 79, no. 2 (February, 1992), p. 53, fig. 10, ill.
Boime, Albert, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” in The Art Bulletin, Vol. LXXV no. 3 (September 1993), p. 423.
Howard, Nancy Shroyer, William Sidney Mount Painter of Rural America (Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, Inc., 1994), pp. 4, 5, ill.
Johnson, Deborah J. et al., William Sidney Mount Painter of American Life (exh. cat. New York, NY: The American Federation of Arts, 1998), pp. 62, 63, 65, 102n137n138, 122, 128n83, 131, 150, fig. 55, ill.
Wilmerding, John, Compass & Clock (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), pp. 102, 103, fig. 30, ill.
May, Stephen, “William Sidney Mount: The Way We Were,” in The World & I (November, 1998), pp. 115, 118, ill.
Stokstad, Marilyn, Art History, Vol. 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), pp. 975, 976, fig. 26-27, ill.
Green, Theodore A., “The Hart-Sells Connection,” in William Sidney Mount: Family, Friends, and Ideas, Elizabeth Kahn Kaplan, Robert W. Kenny and Roger Wunderlich, eds (Setauket, NY: Three Village Historical Society, 1999), pp. 63-67, ill.
Thompson, Kathleen and Austin, Hilary Mac, eds., The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 36, ill.
The American Art Book, (London: Phaidon Press, Inc., 1999), p. 310, ill.
McCourbrey, John, American Tradition in Painting (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 30, Pl. 29, ill.
Voorsanger, Catherine Hoover and Howat, John K., eds., Art and the Empire City New York, 1825 – 1861 (exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 390, 576, fig. 28, ill.
Junker, Patricia, Burns, Sarah et al., Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2003), pp. 204, 205, fig. 117, ill.
Armstead, Myra B. Young ed., Mighty Change, Tall Within, Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2003), cover, ill.
Wilmerding, John, “An American Classic, ‘Eel Spearing at Setauket’ is a painting of formal beauty and cultural significance,” in The Wall Street Journal (January 13-14, 2007), p. 9, ill.
Weinbreg, Barbara H. and Barratt, Carrie Rebora, eds., American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 (exh. cat. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), pp. 67, 68, 211, fig. 64, ill.
Guttman, Allen, Sports and American Art: From Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), pp. 52, 53, Pl. 7, ill.
Bodio, Stephen et al., Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (exh. cat. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), pp. 91 – 93, 176, cat. no. 44, fig. 3.6, ill.
Guardiano, Nicholas L., Transcendentalist Aesthetics in Emerson, Pierce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), p. ix, fig, 4.4, ill.
Olly, Jonathan M., Long Road to Freedom: Surviving Slavery on Long Island (Stony Brook, NY: The Long Island Museum of Art, History, and Carriages, 2021), pp. 10-11, ill.
Artist
William Sidney Mount
(1807 - 1868)
Eel Spearing at Setauket
Date1845
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsSight: 28 1/2 × 35 7/8 in. (72.4 × 91.1 cm)
Object numberN0395.1955
Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Stephen C. Clark
Photograph by Richard Walker
Label TextIn Eel Spearing at Setauket, Mount combined personal experience and specific requests of a patron into one of the most acclaimed American genre paintings of the 19th century. The painting was commissioned by George W. Strong, whose Long Island boyhood was similar to Mount's in that housekeepers, such as Rachel Holland Hart, depicted here, taught each of the boys to fish. Mount chose to portray Hart in the act of instructing. Towering over her young pupil, she is the tallest figure, powerful, her spear poised to strike an unsuspecting eel.Hart was born into a free Black family in Port Jefferson, where over 100 Black families lived during the 19th century. The precision and clarity of Mount’s brushwork, the geometric perfection of his triangular composition, and the dignity and grace with which he invested his human subjects make Eel Spearing a painting that has few equals in American art.
Exhibition History“Paintings and Drawings of William Sidney Mount,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, November 23, 1968 – January 5, 1969; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, January 18, 1969 – February 15, 1969.
“The River: People and Places,” New York State Fair, The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY, April 22 – October 31, 1964.
“Art of the United States,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, September 27 – November 27,1966, no cat. no.
“Untitled (Mount Show),” Century Association, New York, NY, January 3 – March 6, 1967, no cat. no.
“Painter of Rural America, William Sidney Mount, 1807 – 1868,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 23, 1968 – January 5, 1969; City Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, January 18 – February 15, 1969; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 3 – April 15, 1969; M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, May 1 – May 31, 1969, cat. no. 24.
“Nineteenth Century America,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, March 16 – September 7, 1970, cat. no. 54.
“Untitled,” Executive Mansion, Albany, NY, April 16 – July 1, 1974, no cat. no.
726 “A Century and a Half of American Art,” National Academy of Design, New York, NY, October 10 – November 16, 1975, no cat. no.
“The 45th Annual Winter Antique Show,” Lenox Hill Station, New York, NY, January 12 – 25, 1999, no cat.
“William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life,” New York Historical Society, New York, NY, August 14 – October 25, 1998; The Frick Art Museum, New York, NY, November 19, 1998 – January 10, 1999: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, February 5 – April 4, 1999, no cat. no.
“Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825 – 1861,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, September 11, 2000 – January 7, 2001, cat. no. 28.
“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art,” Fenimore Art Museum, August, 23 – December 31, 2008; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, January 25 – April 18, 2010, no cat. no.
“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765 – 1915,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, October 12, 2009 – January 24, 2010; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, February 28 – May 23, 2010, no cat. no.
“Wild Spaces, Open Seasons Hunting and Fishing in American Art,” Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, October 23, 2016 – January 15, 2017; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, February 12 – May 7, 2017; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, October 7, 2017 – January 7, 2018, cat. no. 44.
“Long Road to Freedom: Slavery on Long Island 1651-1827,” Long Island Museum, NY, February 15, 2019 – May 27, 2019.
“Perfect Harmony; The Musical Art and Life of William Sydney Mount,” Long Island Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, May 25, 2019 – September 8, 2019.
BibliographyCatalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1942), p. 22, cat. no. 59, ill.
Cowdrey, Barlett, Williams, Hermann Warner, Jr. et al., William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. xii, 20, cat. no. 36, ill.
“William Sidney Mount Painter Made Long Island his Italy,” in Life Magazine (June 25, 1945), p. 66, ill.
“Historic Museum Piece,” in Newsday (September 4, 1954), n.p., as “Speaking at Setauket,” ill.
Gaul, Enrique F., El Arte en Los Estados Unidos La Pintura, Vol. 1 (Mexico: Ediciones Gamma, 1954), n.p., ill.
“Four Centuries of American Art,” in Minneapolis Sunday Tribune Picture Magazine (November 24, 1963), p. 5, ill.
Frankenstein, Alfred, Painter of Rural America: William Sidney Mount 1807 – 1868 (exh. cat. Stony Brook, NY: The Suffolk County Museum, 1968), p. 37, fig. 49, cat. no. 24, ill.
Novak, Barbara, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1969), pp. 105 – 107, fig. 5.18, ill.
Howat, John K., Willerding, John et al., 19th-Century America Paintings and Sculpture (exh. cat. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), pp. 61, 62, cat. no. 54, ill.
Frankenstein, Alfred, William Sidney Mount (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1975), n.p, fig. 23, ill.
Soffer, Miriam, “The Simple Joys,” in NAHO, Vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1978), p. 6, 9, ill.
“‘Painter for the Many, Not for the Few.’… William Sidney Mount,” in American History Illustrated (May 1979), pp. 25-27, ill.
Wilmerding, John et al., American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850 – 1875 Paintings, Drawings and Photographs (exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1980), pp. 228, 229, fig. 256, ill.
“The Simple Piety of Everyday Life,” in Express (November, 1982), pp. 40, 41, ill.
Pisano, Ronald G., Long Island Landscape Painting 1820 – 1920 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 20, ill.
Tsuda, Margaret, “Spearing Eels, Catching Flat Fish,” in The Christian Science Monitor (December 19, 1989), p. 16, ill.
Wilmerding, John, American Views, Essays on American Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. xi, 78, fig. 52, ill.
“The Power of Music: A Painting by William Sidney Mount,” in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 79, no. 2 (February, 1992), p. 53, fig. 10, ill.
Boime, Albert, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” in The Art Bulletin, Vol. LXXV no. 3 (September 1993), p. 423.
Howard, Nancy Shroyer, William Sidney Mount Painter of Rural America (Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, Inc., 1994), pp. 4, 5, ill.
Johnson, Deborah J. et al., William Sidney Mount Painter of American Life (exh. cat. New York, NY: The American Federation of Arts, 1998), pp. 62, 63, 65, 102n137n138, 122, 128n83, 131, 150, fig. 55, ill.
Wilmerding, John, Compass & Clock (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), pp. 102, 103, fig. 30, ill.
May, Stephen, “William Sidney Mount: The Way We Were,” in The World & I (November, 1998), pp. 115, 118, ill.
Stokstad, Marilyn, Art History, Vol. 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), pp. 975, 976, fig. 26-27, ill.
Green, Theodore A., “The Hart-Sells Connection,” in William Sidney Mount: Family, Friends, and Ideas, Elizabeth Kahn Kaplan, Robert W. Kenny and Roger Wunderlich, eds (Setauket, NY: Three Village Historical Society, 1999), pp. 63-67, ill.
Thompson, Kathleen and Austin, Hilary Mac, eds., The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 36, ill.
The American Art Book, (London: Phaidon Press, Inc., 1999), p. 310, ill.
McCourbrey, John, American Tradition in Painting (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 30, Pl. 29, ill.
Voorsanger, Catherine Hoover and Howat, John K., eds., Art and the Empire City New York, 1825 – 1861 (exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 390, 576, fig. 28, ill.
Junker, Patricia, Burns, Sarah et al., Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2003), pp. 204, 205, fig. 117, ill.
Armstead, Myra B. Young ed., Mighty Change, Tall Within, Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2003), cover, ill.
Wilmerding, John, “An American Classic, ‘Eel Spearing at Setauket’ is a painting of formal beauty and cultural significance,” in The Wall Street Journal (January 13-14, 2007), p. 9, ill.
Weinbreg, Barbara H. and Barratt, Carrie Rebora, eds., American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 (exh. cat. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), pp. 67, 68, 211, fig. 64, ill.
Guttman, Allen, Sports and American Art: From Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), pp. 52, 53, Pl. 7, ill.
Bodio, Stephen et al., Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (exh. cat. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), pp. 91 – 93, 176, cat. no. 44, fig. 3.6, ill.
Guardiano, Nicholas L., Transcendentalist Aesthetics in Emerson, Pierce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), p. ix, fig, 4.4, ill.
Olly, Jonathan M., Long Road to Freedom: Surviving Slavery on Long Island (Stony Brook, NY: The Long Island Museum of Art, History, and Carriages, 2021), pp. 10-11, ill.
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