William Tylee Ranney

William Tylee Ranney’s paintings of scenes from American history and everyday life in the past and present demonstrate the development of a national sense of identity and destiny in the period just before the Civil War. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, Ranney was a sea-captain’s son. As a youth, he worked in an uncle’s business in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and then apprenticed to a tinsmith. In 1833 or 1834 Ranney moved to Brooklyn, New York, to take up painting, interrupted by a nine-month service in the Texas Republic Army in 1836 on which he later drew for subjects for his art. On his return to Brooklyn, Ranney painted portraits, which he soon abandoned in favor of genre scenes, or depictions of everyday life, and historical scenes. With the rapid growth of a broad audience for art in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, such works were enormously popular. Ranney exhibited his paintings regularly at New York City’s National Academy of Design, to which he was elected an associate member in 1850.

Ranney also successfully exhibited his paintings at the American Art-Union, a New York-based commercial organization that aimed to patronize American artists and raise popular interest in American art. Founded in 1839 as the Apollo Association, it lasted only to 1852, but in that span three of Ranney’s paintings were reproduced in engravings that were distributed to its national membership, a strong indication of their anticipated appeal to the average citizen. Ranney’s clearly painted, highly “readable” and accessible works expressed a contemporary spirit of national pride and optimism as the nation prospered and expanded. In his work, the artist embraced images of life on the American frontier, nostalgic scenes of rural life, and themes drawn from the American Revolution and more recent history that stressed the role of ordinary individuals in momentous events. In his last years Ranney specialized in sporting pictures, several of which were translated into engravings and widely distributed by the New York lithographic firm of Currier and Ives.

Ranney painted his highly realistic scenes in the studio of his home in West Hoboken, New Jersey, from a large collection of authentic costumes, weapons, riding gear, and preserved game; he kept a stable of horses from which to model his mounts. The artist’s production declined around 1855 due to the developing tuberculosis that took his life two years later. The detailed realism and heroic spirit of Ranney’s work doomed it to obscurity for more than a century after the artist’s death. Today, however, he is recognized as a significant genre and history painter of the pre-Civil War era.