John Quidor

Born and raised in the small town of Tappan along the Hudson River, Quidor later lived and worked in the notorious Five Points district of New York City. There, he skirted the margins of the New York art world, splitting his career between painting engine panels for the City’s fire brigades and producing literary genre scenes, most based on the tales of Washington Irving and steeped in the Netherlandish lore of the Hudson River Valley. Across these pursuits, Quidor upended the conventions of both history and history painting. During an age that prized reason and exalted history, he presented the past not as fact but as an elusive matter bound to invention, imagination and selective storytelling. This new book interweaves some of Quidor's best known literary paintings—scenes from Irving’s A History of NewYork and Tales of a Traveller, as well as the short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—with new objects including his sole surviving engine painting for New YorkCity’s early firefighting companies, and a newly rediscovered student copy after Quidor’s lost original for Columbian Fire Engine No. 14.