American Genre Painting
Title | American Genre Painting PDF eBook |
Author | Elizabeth Johns |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Total Pages | 292 |
Release | 1991-01-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780300057546 |
American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings--of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk--served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation--arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices--and not a blissful celebration of American democracy--that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.
American Encounters
Title | American Encounters PDF eBook |
Author | Peter John Brownlee |
Publisher | Lucia Marquand Books |
Total Pages | 0 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780295992693 |
Genre painting flourished in the U.S. during the mid-19th century. These narrative scenes depicting the everyday activities of stock or typed characters captivated American audiences. Delineating distinctly American characters, often through the exploration of racial, regional, or class differences, genre painting, like landscape, was often called upon as a vehicle for expression of cultural nationalism. Two paintings from the Louvre represent the Dutch and English schools, key sources on which genre painters in the U.S. drew in developing their own idiom. These rich genre paintings, alongside three outstanding American examples, enable the exploration of a variety of interrelated themes including the development of character types, confrontations between them, the spaces of their confrontations, the role of the senses as well as music and narrative, and the graphic reproduction and dissemination of genre paintings in the form of prints. Genre Painting and Everyday Life accompanies the first of a series of focused exhibitions collaboratively organized by the Musee du Louvre, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The Civil War and American Art
Title | The Civil War and American Art PDF eBook |
Author | Eleanor Jones Harvey |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Total Pages | 353 |
Release | 2012-12-03 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0300187335 |
Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.
Re-envisioning the Everyday
Title | Re-envisioning the Everyday PDF eBook |
Author | John Fagg |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Total Pages | 267 |
Release | 2023 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0271095822 |
"Traces the history of American genre painting from 1905 to 1945. Examines how artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, and Jacob Lawrence adapted to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art"--
Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting
Title | Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting PDF eBook |
Author | Lacey Baradel |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 196 |
Release | 2020-12-31 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1000290468 |
This book examines the portrayal of themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement in US genre paintings during the second half of the long nineteenth century (c. 1860–1910). Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.
Grand Themes
Title | Grand Themes PDF eBook |
Author | Jochen Wierich |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Total Pages | 237 |
Release | 2012-01-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0271050322 |
"Explores history painting in the United States during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Includes the work of artists such as Daniel Huntington, Lilly Martin Spencer, and Eastman Johnson"--Provided by publisher.
Mirror to the American Past
Title | Mirror to the American Past PDF eBook |
Author | Hermann Warner Williams |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 248 |
Release | 1973 |
Genre | Genre painting |
ISBN | 9780821204443 |