pdf - Schwarz Gallery

16
Christian Friedrich Mayr, N.A.
(American, born Bavaria, 1803–1851)
It’s Too Tight, 1837
Oil on canvas, 24 x 21 inches
Signed and dated at lower right (at bottom of door): “C. Mayr 1837”
Provenance: Schwarz Gallery by 1984; Pennsylvania private collection, 1986–2003
Exhibited: National Academy of Design, New York (1837), no. 227
References: Chad Mandeles in William H. Gerdts et al., From All Walks of Life: Paintings of the
Figure from the National Academy of Design (New York: National Academy of Design, 1979), p. 69;
Helene M. Kastinger Riley, “Christian Friedrich Mayr,” The Magazine Antiques, vol. 154, no. 5
(Nov. 1998), pp. 688–95 (repro. p. 694, pl. 9)
The portrait and genre painter Christian Mayr was born in Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany, and probably studied both
with his stepfather, Christian Friedrich Fues (1772–1836), and at the Royal Art Academy in Nuremberg. It is recorded that
he was an architectural painter and a lithographer at Nuremberg in 1823, the same year he entered the Royal Academy in
Munich. Mayr arrived in New York about 1833. In the same year, he exhibited six paintings at the National Academy of
Design. In 1835 he went to Boston, and the following year he went to the South; Mayr finally settled in South Carolina.
In 1838 he became an American citizen in Charleston, where he resided until 1843. While there he also ventured into the
field of daguerreotype photography, advertising “whole length likenesses” on February 13, 1843. In 1844 he went to New
Orleans but returned to New York the next year, where he remained until his death.
Although Mayr painted portraits to earn his living, he is best remembered for his genre scenes depicting humorous events
of everyday life in America. His best-known painting is a large canvas of black people dancing in a hotel kitchen, titled
Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, executed in 1838 and now in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. 1 That
work, like this one, dates from his Charleston period. Mayr exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design and was
elected an Academician in 1849. Also in New York, he exhibited at the American Academy of the Fine Arts in 1835 and at
the Apollo Association in 1839 and 1840. The Apollo Association purchased three of his paintings in 1839, and the
American Art-Union bought ten of his works for distribution among its members between 1847 and 1851. His painting
Reading the News is in the permanent collection of the National Academy of Design and his work also was exhibited in the
Academy’s Centennial Exhibition in 1925.
Note
1. See Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 114, 127.