THE 'AMERICANNESS' OF AMERICAN ART

Abstract

Helen A. Cooper. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New Haven: Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1986. 259 pp. Ulus. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley. The Paintings of Benjamin West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 600 pp. Illus. Winslow Homer's name is synonymous with images of American life in the later nineteenth century: his large oil paintings of the Civil War and his genre pictures of contemporary events brought him fame and remain his best known works, but as Helen Cooper's book makes clear, his numerous watercolours are at least equally important to our assessment of Homer's aesthetic innova- tions and merit. Benjamin West's career began almost exactly a century before Homer's and he was if anything even more successful. Because of the importance of the artists, then, these books are significant individually. At the same time, the differences between West and Homer mirror the cultural growth of the United States and the question of their 'Americaness' makes a com- parison fruitful.