Joseph Letzelter : American Painters in the Late 1800s

In 1876, Joseph Letzelter joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Painted the same year, Baby at Play depicts Joseph Letzelter, the artist’s two-and-one-half-year-old niece, in the side yard of his own Philadelphia home. Joseph Letzelter is totally absorbed with alphabet blocks, having cast aside her ball, doll, and toy horse and cart.

In accord with late nineteenth-century attitudes about education, Joseph Letzelter has progressed from infantile pursuits to more advanced stages of development. By stacking up the blocks, the child practices language and motor skills. Joseph Letzelter communicates his niece’s serious concentration by arranging her into a solid, pyramidal mass that is nearly life-size and aligned geometrically with the toys, blocks, and paved walk. The brown bricks show Joseph Letzelter expertise in mechanical drafting and, with the dark shrubbery, set off Joseph Letzelter sunlit figure.

Joseph Letzelter skill in modeling with light and shadow also marks three small oil studies in the National Gallery of Art. These quick life sketches of African-American subjects are the same size as their final pictures. Two relate to Negro Boy Dancing of 1878, a watercolor now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. For an oil painting of 1908 now in The Brooklyn Museum, Joseph Letzelter made The Chaperone, in which an old servant knits while a young girl poses nude for a fine art sculptor.