Artist and author Charles Lanman's output was informed by and representative his nature travels east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrote about the major personalities of his field and time. The collection includes twenty- three unpublished manuscripts about these subjects, as well as a family history; official documents relating to the administration of Lanman's estate and art collections; personal and professional correspondence; photographs; newspaper clippings; and ephemera relating to an exhibition about Lanman. It also contains reproductions of Lanman's artwork, transcripts, notes, biographical and literary lists, and correspondence generated by E. Maurice Bloch, a scholar and collector specializing in American art who undertook research on Charles Lanman in the second half of the twentieth century.

Charles Lanman was born in 1819 and spent his childhood exploring the wilds of Michigan. From 1835 to 1845, Lanman studied and worked in New York, where he was associated with the Hudson River School. In 1848, Lanman moved to Washington, DC, where he married Adeline Dogge in 1849. During his time there, he served as librarian of the War Department, the Department of the Interior, the House of Representatives, and the Washington City Library; and as private secretary to Daniel Webster. He was a prolific landscape and character painter, and also wrote extensively about many major New York artists and political figures of the early to mid-nineteenth century with whom he was associated, including George Caitlin, John James Audubon, and Daniel Huntington. One of the first non-native travelers to use a birch bark canoe, Lanman recorded his adventures on the rivers east of the Rocky Mountains in more than 1000 oil studies, 700 pencil sketches, 33 books and numerous newspaper articles. He died in Washington, DC in 1895.E. Maurice Bloch, American art historian, professor, curator and collector, was born in New York City on October 26, 1916. Bloch enrolled at New York University, first as an undergraduate in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, then as a graduate student in the Institute of Fine Arts, for which he wrote a dissertation on George Caleb Bingham (not completed until 1967). He taught at the University of Missouri (1944-1945), New York University (1945-1946), and the University of Minnesota (1946-1947). He was curator of prints at Cooper Union Museum (1952- ca. 1957). His tenure at the University of California, Los Angeles, began in 1956 and lasted until his retirement in 1982, and he was the founding director of UCLA's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Additionally, he was actively involved with the Western Division of the Archives of American Art, and helped negotiate a cooperative arrangement between the AAA, the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery, and the Huntington Library. His scholarly interests were in American art. Bloch died December 1989 in Los Angeles.

1 Linear Feet (3 boxes)

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