Genre Painting as Ideology

Abstract

IN 1835, WILLIAM SYDNEY MOUNT PRODUCED FARMERS BARGAINING and opened a vein of genre painting, a mother lode (33), that sustained him for a decade. A critic recognized that Mount's painting presented an image of pure Yankeeism (31). Mount depended on the currency of Yankee farmer jokes to play upon his elite patrons' ambivalence toward the newly empowered populace. In American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life, Elizabeth Johns shows that Yankee farmer jokes and social tensions were crucial aspects of nineteenth-century genre painting. She departs from traditional art history's preoccupation with form, style, influence, and iconography. Her concern is the meanings that genre paintings possessed for men and women in antebellum America.' While other art historians have examined individual American genre painters -William Sydney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, Lilly Martin Spencer-no one before Johns has tried to comprehend nineteenth-century genre painting as a cultural practice.2 She questions