Lot 56: Edward Troye , American 1808-1874 Colonel Virgil Gardner and His Huntsman oil on canvas

signed E. Troye and dated May 1855 (lower left) oil on canvas

measurements 61 1/2 by 86 in. alternate measurements 156.2 by 218.4 cm

Charles Cort, "Edward Troye in Alabama," Alabama Heritage, Tuscaloosa, Spring 2006, no. 80, pp. 18-24 (illustrated in color pp. 18-19)
Jesse Swanson, "The Rich History of Gardiner Island," The Selma Times-Journal, August 27, 2007

Colonel Virgil H. Gardner, "Riverdale", Selma, Alabama (acquired from the artist in 1855)
William Gardner (by descent from above, his father, in 1881)
Mr. and Mrs. William Henry King
Thence by descent to the present owner

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, SAN ANTONIO
Edward Troye painted Colonel Virgil Gardner and his Huntsman in 1855, on Gardner's cotton plantation in central Alabama. Recently rediscovered, the painting is one of Troye's largest works and the only one known today to feature a hunting theme.

On a dark bay horse, a rifle across his saddle and accompanied by a black farmhand or huntsman and a half dozen hounds and pointers, Colonel Gardner gestures welcomingly toward a distant river and what is probably the eponymously titled Gardner's Island (or Gardiner's), the site of a steamboat landing which served Gardner's vast plantation.

Edward Troye was America's premiere painter of thoroughbred horses and prize livestock during the mid-nineteenth century. Of French descent, Troye was born in Switzerland to a family of artists and may have had some additional training during his teens when his family lived in England. Setting out on his own, Troye came to the United States in 1831 and began a painting and illustrating career in Philadelphia. By 1834, Troye had established a reputation as a skilled horse painter and was traveling throughout the northeast and the south to the great farms and plantations of the nation, painting portraits of his patrons' most prized animals. Over a forty year career, Troye painted virtually every great thoroughbred and racing champion in the country. In 1849, married and the father of a child, Troye accepted a teaching post at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, which provided him a stable home and income. For the next six years, Troye's work was more narrowly centered on the greater Mobile and New Orleans region, and his oeuvre is marked by an important step into portraiture -- although those portraits are nearly always built around themes of horses, pony carts, or an occasional donkey. Colonel Gardner's hunting portrait was completed during the last months of Troye's tenure as a drawing professor, just before the artist accepted an invitation to travel with a Kentucky patron on a horse buying tour of Europe and the Middle East.

When Colonel Virgil Gardner and His Huntsman was first exhibited in the 1990s it was believed to depict the Colonel's son William, perhaps because of an uncertainty about the date -- Troye returned to Alabama, to the Huntsville area, to live for a time after the Civil War. Recent examination has revealed the clear date of May 1855 and thus identifies the sitter as Virgil H. Gardner. Virgil Gardner, born in 1808 in Georgia, inherited his father's large land holdings at the juncture of Mulberry Creek and the Alabama River, to the east of Selma, roughly 150 miles upriver from Mobile, in 1826. Colonel Gardner built an especially successful cotton and pine plantation and erected a grand home, Riverdale, which still stands, although it has been moved to a nearby site.

This catalogue note was written by Alexandra Murphy.