In Nature’s Realm: The Art of Gerard Rutgers Hardenbergh

February 19, 2021–January 9, 2022

Morven Museum & Garden is proud to present the first exhibition examining the work of Gerard Rutgers Hardenbergh (1856–1915). Born in New Brunswick, the great-great-grandson of Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh (1736–1790), the first president of Queens College (Rutgers University), Hardenbergh was a self-taught artist and ornithologist. Hardenbergh’s work provides a special glimpse into the Garden State on the brink of rapid development.

In line with its mission of celebrating the art of New Jersey, Morven Museum & Garden is proud to present the first exhibition examining the work of Gerard Rutgers Hardenbergh (1856–1915). Born in New Brunswick, the great-great-grandson of Reverend Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh (1736–1790), the first president of Queens College (Rutgers University), Hardenbergh was a self-taught artist and ornithologist.  As a young man he spent time at Chadwick House, the Jersey Shore’s most famous sporting club located just south of present-day Mantoloking. His early love of wildlife became a lifelong passion for the study of birds. Splitting his time between New Brunswick and the Jersey Shore, Hardenbergh collected and preserved shore birds, sending important specimens to the Biology Department at Princeton University. Intertwined with his interest in the young field of ornithology was his development as an artist. At the age of eighteen, Hardenbergh’s paintings were exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia where he was praised as “a careful and accurate ornithologist and prominent artist.”  His works were scientifically accurate and popular, one newspaper later described Hardenbergh as “...a student whose books have been the woods and whose mentor Dame Nature herself…” With a studio on board his houseboat Pelican, which he moored around Bay Head, Hardenbergh became an eccentric fixture along the Jersey Shore.

Morven’s five-gallery exhibition also presents the commercial work done by Hardenbergh, including designs for porcelain, chromolithographs, and his unique games and charts published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. From the untouched land surrounding Barnegat Bay and the diverse wildlife that called it home, to the picturesque steeples and meadows around New Brunswick, Hardenbergh’s work provides a special glimpse into the Garden State on the brink of rapid development.

Morven Museum & Garden is proud to showcase the ways in which NJ-born creations came to be the building blocks of today’s technology, with loans from the AT&T Archives and History Center, MIT Museum, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the Historical Society of Princeton, Monmouth County Historical Association, Telesat Canada, and other private lenders. This exhibition will include original historical artifacts pertinent to the many discoveries, products and fields of work that comprised the Bell System in NJ, from the 1920s to around 1984, when the Bell System monopoly divestiture created the seven “Baby Bells” known as the Regional Bell Operating Companies.