Nineteenth-century American Art Research Articles

Playing Parrot: American Trompe L’oeil and Empire

American trompe l’oeil still life is full of global goods. Attending to this genre within a nexus of trade and colonialism in the Gilded Age can correct for an absence of empire in transnational scholarship on nineteenth-century American art. This context informs De Scott Evans’s trompe l’oeil painting of a parrot, an animal that by virtue of its mimicry could be imprinted with the history of its own colonial circulation. I argue that Evans and other painters deployed the logic of trompe l’oeil—a hyperillusionistic style often belittled by critics as mere parroting—to expose the politics of colonial goods.

Evolving Images of Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century American Art

Robert Walter Weir’s Taking the Veil (1863) is perhaps the best-known depiction of a woman religious in American art. Hailed as a masterpiece, the painting received an outpouring of public enthusiasm during a period characterized by its antipathy to the emerging Catholic Church, especially its convents. As a historical artifact, Taking the Veil reveals much about attitudes toward women religious in the United States, Protestant fascination with Catholic rituals, and a new understanding of the place of religion itself in American art. Women religious were objects of fascination in the emerging American art scene and appeared at every level of the marketplace, proliferating in catch-penny dime novels, children’s readers, genteel gift books, and even high art oil paintings like Weir’s. Inspired by Weir’s own encounter with Catholic art during his studies in Italy as a young man, the artist intended his piece to be a testament to “the value of art as a handmaid of Religion.” Rather than view Taking the Veil in isolation as one painter’s private encounter with Catholicism, it is more useful to see it as part of an evolving understanding of both women religious and religious art.

Rendering violence: riots, strikes, and upheaval in nineteenth-century American art

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. How Could a Mob Be Painted? Picturing Political Violence in the Jacksonian Era 2. Painting That Might Prove Injurious: Cinque and the Representation of African American Political Violence 3. Riot, Rowdyism, and Reform: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of Midcentury Urban Upheaval 4. Trouble on the Home Front: Art, Democracy, and Disorder during the Civil War 5. Painting and Political Violence at Century's End Conclusion Notes List of Illustrations Index

Critical shift: rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the narratives of nineteenth-century American art

Critical shift: rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the narratives of nineteenth-century American art

Emanuel Swedenborg's Aesthetic Philosophy and Its Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Art

Abstract: American art in the nineteenth century had a close affinity with God. By mid-century this led landscape artists in particular to espouse the views of John Ruskin, who encouraged artists to find the divine in the minute details of nature. They found their calling by rendering disciplined representations of nature. On the other hand, Swedenborg's theology and aesthetic philosophy called artists to a different vision. The artists who found it sought to show the spiritual—living reality—not so much through nature as through the force behind it. Nature clothes spirit, and they used light, shade, and colour to “unveil” spirit. Elements of Swedenborg's theology that shape an implicit aesthetic philosophy are outlined. The application of this philosophy in the works of four visionary artists is discussed: Hiram Powers, William Page, George Inness, and Ralph Albert Blakelock.

Emanuel Swedenborg's Aesthetic Philosophy and Its Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Art

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Of Oysters and Art: Charles Parkhurst (1913––2008)

Research Article| February 01 2009 Of Oysters and Art: Charles Parkhurst (1913––2008) carol clark carol clark carol clark is the William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art and American Studies at Amherst College, where she has taught since 1987. She writes on nineteenth-century American art and culture, and her next book, published in conjunction with an exhibition she has organized for the Denver Art Museum, is Charles Deas and 1840s America (2009). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2009) 9 (1): 12–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2009.9.1.12 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation carol clark; Of Oysters and Art: Charles Parkhurst (1913––2008). Gastronomica 1 February 2009; 9 (1): 12–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2009.9.1.12 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search This content is only available via PDF. ©© 2009 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

British Encounters with American Art

The Ashcan School paintings discussed in Douglas Tallack’s Urban Visual Culture course at the University of Nottingham were, for me, the hook. I was enthralled by the way that my growing knowledge of the history of chaotic, cosmopolitan, early-twentieth-century New York opened up the complex legibility of these works. Coming to American studies after having previously read English and philosophy, I was surprised to be spending my time looking at art. However, while researching my thesis (“On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism”), as a Terra summer residency fellow, and in my postdoctoral career, I have sought to catch up on both art history practice and the history of American art. I now teach in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham, where I offer courses entitled The Emergence of Mass Culture and American Realisms. My journey, from novice to teacher—or novice teacher—in less than a decade represents a fairly intense encounter with American art. But it also suggests a trajectory, from initial fascination to a more informed engagement, relevant to encounters of other kinds. At Nottingham, visual art forms one element of our interdisciplinary Thought and Culture survey and is also taught in specialist options, such as those named above and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s course African American Visual Culture. Both approaches are used at other U.K. American studies undergraduate programs: at the University of Leicester, painting and photography are discussed in courses exploring the City and the West; at King’s College London, Shamoon Zamir leads secondand final-year options titled Visual Culture: An Introduction and Photography USA; and at the University of Winchester, Carol Smith asks the students who take her Picturing a Nation course to reflect on the discourse surrounding recent exhibitions of American art in Europe. At these and other programs, American art is explored in an interdisciplinary American studies framework, with all the attendant benefits and dangers. American art also appears in U.K. university curricula within art history programs. Typically offered as options for secondand final-year students who have already taken the introduction to Western art, these courses tend to be specific in period or thematic focus. While the emphasis is often post-1945, as in the New York School course at the University of Leeds, Michael Hatt examines an earlier moment in Modern American Art, 1900–1930 at the University of Warwick, and Andrew Hemingway teaches Inventing the Americans: Issues in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture at University College London. While sharing the common difficulty of teaching the subject at some distance from its objects and archives, art history and American studies programs in Britain provide distinct disciplinary frames for American art. In the opening sessions of my Realisms module, I have to combine discussion of Thomas Eakins’s career with a crash course in how to read a painting, but when we come to social realism I can rely on existing knowledge of the Depression and the New Deal. Teaching students with strong foundations in methodology and with the background provided by the course The Traditions and Institutions of Western Art, Michael Hatt includes novels and cultural histories on his reading lists to provide context of earlytwentieth-century America. Both situations demand that teachers think closely about what American art requires. As yet, U.K. academics have not concluded that encounters with American art need to be framed by an American art survey. A trawl through teaching syllabuses reveals no evidence of such a course being taught. Anecdotally, at least, this approach appears to work. Students find ways of discussing the images they are shown in class, and in the courses I teach and moderate, I have read outstanding essays on racial stereotypes in early-twentieth-century advertising imagery, Edward Hopper’s sense of space and place, and historical references

Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth‐Century American Art

Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Art Sarah Burns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. In Painting the Dark Side, Sarah Burns argues that the canonical narrative of nineteenth-century American art describes a quest for a national visual identity, while at the same time, a number of artists unmasked a darker side of the narrative in which anxiety, fear, superstition, and madness ruled. This book presents a thoughtful, rigorous examination of the side in nineteenth-century American art. Burns claims that an exploration of the dark world lurking beneath the surface of nineteenth-century art actually allows us to understand the mainstream more fully. Thus, she explores the work of eight artists in biographical and historical, social, and cultural terms to reveal broader cultural anxieties about social, political, and economic instability in a rapidly changing, industrializing society. Burns traces the personal demons and artistic anxieties in the art of four artists working in antebellum America (Thomas Cole, David Gilmour Blythe, Washington Allston, and John Quidor), and of four artists active in postbellum America (William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakms, and Albert Pinkham Ryder). Each chapter is dedicated to a single artist and contains expansive but detailed explorations of how local anxieties prove symptomatic of larger societal insecurities. The nineteenth-century society that Burns describes was one that prized enlightenment, industrialization, imperialism, hard work, self-help, science, order, and progress, and sought to establish a stable and balanced society in which everyone had a well-defined place and a clear set of proscribed and prescribed behaviors. Fissures caused by rapid industrialization, slavery, immigration, and urban poverty, however, generated fears of societal chaos and disorder. Painting the Dark Side explores how the particular fears of eight artists-plagued by self-doubt, torn between their public personae and private selves, caught between the rational and irrational world-are indicators of larger social and cultural anxieties. Burns explores how fears of Jacksonian democracy, downward social mobility, poverty and anarchy in the modern city, fear of violent slave uprisings, terrors of internecine struggle, brutal clashes among the immigrant under classes, a clamor for women's rights, and even suspect scientific practices were viewed as symptoms of a wider social malaise that, left unchecked, could lead to chaos. In chapter one, the author analyzes Thomas Cole's rejection of his modest origins to gain entree into the elite society of his patrons, and whose antipathy for and fear of mob rule grew as he rose in society. Burns expands this argument to show how the dominant classes increasingly portrayed the rising industrial city as physically and philosophically sullied, a diseased and depressed body politic. In chapter two, Burns argues that David Gilmour Blythe painted Pittsburgh from a thug's eye view to critique self-satisfied middle-class dabblers in social reform. He courted an elite market for his paintings, yet painted in a strange muddy style of scrubby lines, sketchy faces, rubbery surfaces, [and] smeary paint that antagonized potential patrons (68). Burns proposes that Blythe's belligerent and acerbic art, as well as his drunken cynicism, points to larger apprehensions about the volatility of immigrant populations and an antagonistic, bellicose, and often drunken underclass. Chapter three describes how Washington Allston lived a double life of a Southern slave-holder and a cosmopolitan artist embedded in a strongly abolitionist Boston society. Burns's study of Allston's individual guilt and fear as a slave owner is expanded to suggest that his fears were indicative of widespread uneasiness in white Southern antebellum society. In chapter four, John Quidor is portrayed as an artist who aspired to acceptance into the artistic mainstream by basing most of his art on the writings of Washington Irving, but who actually earned local fame and a good sum of money by painting New York city fire trucks, and who lived the rough, coarse, drunk, and disorderly life of the working classes. …

Artists of Colonial America

Artists of Colonial America Elisabeth L. Roark. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. In recent years, the scholarship on nineteenthcentury American art has become increasingly sophisticated, historically and methodologically. It has engendered an ever-widening and vibrant discourse. Other than a handful of monographs on portraiture and gravestones in the 1970s and the 1980s, and some significant work on Copley since the 1990s, it is therefore surprising to find that the field of colonial American art has been largely ignored. Artists of Colonial America is a significant corrective to this collective and unaccountable oversight. Elisabeth Roark presents the first historically rigorous, comprehensive narrative of the arts of painting, sculpture, printmaking, pastel drawing, and silversmithing in colonial America. Roark examines the art and lives of ten specific colonial artists. In the introduction to the book, she describes how these ten artists were chosen and presents her theoretical and methodological orientation. The ten artists examined include John White, an artist-explorer from the late sixteenthcentury Roanoke Island colony; John Foster, the first known colonial prmtmaker from Massachusetts; the unidentified late seventeenth-century painter of the Freake family portraits in Boston; Joseph Lamson, one of the first early eighteenthcentury stonecutters whose work is found in both northern and southern colonies; Henrietta Johnson, the first professional woman artist to work in the early eighteenth-century colonies; Criistavns Hessehus, the first significant portrait painter to work in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia; Paul Revere, the silversmith, printer, and revolutionary whose fame spanned both pre- and postRevolutionary Boston; John Singleton Copley, the first late-colonial portrait painter from Boston to achieve fame and fortune in the colonies and in England; and finally, Benjamin West, the first latecolonial history painter from Philadelphia, who ultimately became painter to King George III and second president of London's Royal Academy. Roark explores the respective historical, political, economic, social, religious, and cultural milieux from which each artist emerged. This contextual analysis is then buttressed by extended passages identifying very specific political, religious, or cultural pressures that were brought to bear on each artist. In chapter three, for instance, Roark interweaves her art historical narrative of the painter of the Freake portraits with extended expositions on the character of mercantile and Puritan Boston in 1670. …

Nineteenth-century American art

1. The Profession of the Artist 2. Portraiture 3. Typologies of Democracy: the early Nineteenth Century 4. Democracy at Work: the later Nineteenth Century 5. Landscape 6. The American West . Commemorative Art: Memory and Myth.

Index to nineteenth century American art periodicals

Index to nineteenth century American art periodicals

The landscape of belief: encountering the Holy Land in nineteenth-century American art and culture

The landscape of belief: encountering the Holy Land in nineteenth-century American art and culture

American icons: transatlantic perspectives on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art

American painters and graphic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought inspiration for their work in the uniquely American experience of history and nature. The result was a transformation of the conventional Old World visual language into an indigenous and populist New World syntax. The twelve essays in this volume explore the development of a frontier mythology, a democratic style depicting common people and objects, and an American artistic consciousness and identity. Conceived and written from the perspectives of both cultural and art historians, American Icons initiates an interdisciplinary discussion on the complex relationships between American and European art. Contributors are Herbert Beck, Werner Busch, Martin Christadler, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Francoise Forster-Hahn, Ursula Frohne, Barbara Gaehtgens, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Barbara Groseclose, Olaf Hansen, William Hauptman, Heinz Ickstadt, Barbara Novak, and Kathleen Pyne.

Pastoral inventions: rural life in nineteenth-century American art and culture

Pastoral inventions: rural life in nineteenth-century American art and culture

The Naughty Child in Nineteenth-Century American Art

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Americans began to promote the visual arts as a means of defining and fostering national identity. One highly significant consequence of this new aesthetic was the rise of a native genre art which depicted uniquely “American” customs and characters. Focussing upon and interpreting the daily world of average citizens in an emphatically optimistic and ideal manner, these works of art celebrated the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society. They tended chiefly to represent rural American activities – maple sugaring, quilting frolics, scenes of harvest and the like – and to rely upon a standard cast of characters – the farmer, the housewife, the peddler, the trapper, for example – each of whom exemplified a particular trait or traits that seemed distinctly “American.”

“The Ravages of the Axe”: The Meaning of the Tree Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art

Throughout most of the nineteenth century and especially after about 1825, when American landscape painting became the primary form of national artistic expression, painters strove to be as articulate as possible about the matters of national and historical purpose that were of such moment to the era. This ambition assumed different forms, but it is always prudent to assume that landscape paintings bear some deliberate charge of meaning, and that their makers used symbols that would make this meaning publicly accessible. Among such symbols are apocalyptic sunsets, autumnal foliage, scenes of untouched wilderness, and even a pronounced horizontal pictorial format, which responds to the nature of American space. The tree stump was also, I believe, employed in American landscapes as a widely understood iconographic device. Although the cut stump appears in European and English art, its frequency and numbers in American art are unique, and it is a special element of American artistic language.1

The Boxing Paintings of Thomas Eakins

Late in the 1890s, accompanied by several of his friends, Thomas Eakins attended a number of prizefights at the Arena on the corner of Broad and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia, diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a few blocks from his Chestnut Street studio. Eakins was sufficiently intrigued by the matches he saw to befriend several of the participants and to ask them to pose for him. The results were three major canvases—Taking the Count (1898—Yale University Art Gallery, Whitney Collections of Sporting Art, New Haven, Conn.), Salutat (1898—Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.), and Between Rounds (1899—Philadelphia Museum of Art)—and about ten related sketches, studies, and portraits. Although since ancient times painters and sculptors have celebrated their periods' equivalent of the pugilist, Eakins' boxing paintings are completely original in their conception. Indeed, one can think of few works by a serious artist of Eakins' era as far removed from the lofty propriety that dominated nineteenthcentury American art as are these treatments of nearly nude boxers. The boxing paintings reflect Eakins' special fondness for sport and vigorous activity in his life and art, as well as his sometimes controversial belief in portraying the unidealized human figure; but they go beyond these interests insofar as they are complicated compositions by a mature master who is using his craft to examine his life and career.

The Pythagorean Puzzle of Patrick Lyon

Among the best-known products of early nineteenth-century American art are John Neagle's portraits of Pat Lyon at the Forge of 1825–26 and 1829 (Figs. 1 and 2). Works that launched their then-novice artist into distinction as a portraitist, the twin versions of Pat Lyon have since become emblems of their period.1 With increasing frequency they appear in surveys of American art history as evidence, even in portraiture, of a development towards a less idealized, more veristic realism, a realism whose sources are the legible signifiers of everyday (one might say democratic) experience.2 Corollary to this thesis is the opinion that the iconography of Neagle's portraits of Lyon, like that of many contemporary American works, is largely self-evident, a matter merely of the correct identification of their major features and of the narration of their story.3 The viewer is encouraged to accept the works at face value: their apparent secularization and individualization of subject matter would seem to preclude any ...