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April 6, 2007
The Schwarz Gallery announces
The Green Tree, an exhibition of art and artifacts
that highlights the collection of the Mutual Assurance Company of Philadelphia. The exhibition
is accompanied by a 56 page fully-illustrated color catalog.
The Mutual Assurance Company for Insuring Homes from Loss by Fire was founded shortly after the end of
the American Revolution in 1784 by members of the Philadelphia Contributorship for the Insurance of
Houses from Loss by Fire and others who were dissatisfied by that company’s refusal to insure houses
with trees on their street façades. The new company insured homes fronted by carefully pruned trees
and adopted the image of a green tree as its corporate emblem and fire mark. The company, which came
to be known simply as “The Green Tree,” greatly expanded its policyholder base and prospered, and in
1812 purchased its first office on 54 Walnut Street.
The company’s trustees began to acquire portraits in 1815, when they commissioned the local artist
Bass Otis to paint a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait of George Washington. A major event
took place in 1839, when the trustees commissioned John Neagle to paint a portrait of the sixth chairman
of their board of directors, James Cowles Fisher, thereby initiating a corporate tradition that lasted well
into the twentieth century. It may seem unlikely that a group of conservative insurance executives would
be sensitive to art and aesthetics, but from the outset they possessed an uncanny knack for choosing the
most appropriate portraitist for a given chairman. Neagle characteristically produced a straightforward
image of the philanthropic, kindly businessman Fisher; Thomas Eakins was selected, despite his reputation
for controversy, to paint posthumous portraits of the military hero and entrepreneur George Cadwalader;
complicated arrangements were made so that John Singer Sargent could paint the accomplished cosmopolite
Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell while visiting the United States from London. The Green Tree executives had
Cecilia Beaux paint a progressive, impressionist-style portrait of the businessman and amateur photographer
J. Dickinson Sergeant; they selected William Merritt Chase to paint the good-natured raconteur Henry
Williams Biddle; and, perhaps most surprising of all, they granted Alexander Cassatt’s request to have
his likeness painted by Philip Pearlstein.
The Mutual Assurance Company also amassed a wide range of items related to era of volunteer firefighting companies.
The most important among these include rare nineteenth-century fire engine models, one of which was made in Lancaster
by two sons of the noted portraitist Jacob Eichholz; a hand-painted
bronze figure of a fireman made by the Philadelphia firm Cornelius & Baker; articles of firemen’s clothing, such as
parade hats, helmets, and belts; a group of hand-sewn leather fire buckets; an assortment of speaking horns, axes,
spanners, wrenches, and a parade torch; numerous European and American fire marks dating from the eighteenth through
the early twentieth centuries; and a complete set of six lithographs from Louis Maurer and Nathaniel Currier’s “Life
of a Fireman” series.
The Schwarz Gallery is located in a Center City Philadelphia townhouse near Rittenhouse Square.
We welcome visitors Monday through Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, Saturday 10am to 5pm.
The gallery is closed on Saturdays June 1–August 31 except by appointment.
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