First published in 1977. The purpose of this study is to locate the sources for the American style of painting characterised by measure and design – the representation of the specific and familiar according to principles of pictorial order. The reader shall see that there were a variety of conventions available to the artist and that his selection of one or another of them depended upon pragmatic, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations.
The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold. In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.” Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning. Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today. Includes Color Images and Maps
This work provides an overview of the progress that has characterized the field of research and policy in art education. It profiles and integrates history, policy, learning, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and competing perspectives.
Art, Observation, and an Anthropology of Illustration examines the role of sketches, drawings and other artworks in our understanding of human cultures of the past. Bringing together art historians and anthropologists, it presents a selection of detailed case studies of various bodies of work produced by non-Western and Western artists from different world regions and from different time periods (from Native North America, Cameroon, and Nepal, to Italy, Solomon Islands, and Mexico) to explore the contemporary relevance and challenges implicit in artistic renditions of past peoples and places. In an age when identities are partially constructed on the basis of existing visual records, the book asks important questions about the nature of observation and the inclusion of culturally-relevant information in artistic representations. How reliable are watercolours, paintings, or sketches for the understanding of past ways of life? How do old images of bygone peoples relate to art historical and anthropological canons? How have these images and technologies of representation been used to describe, illustrate, or explain unknown realities? The book is an essential tool for art historians, anthropologists, and anyone who wants to understand how the observation of different realities has impacted upon the production of art and visual cultures. Incorporating current methodological and theoretical tools, the 10 chapters collected here expand the area of connection between the disciplines of art history and anthropology, bringing into sharp focus the multiple intersections of objectivity, evidence, and artistic licence.
This set of 11 volumes, originally published between 1946 and 2001, amalgamates a wide breadth of research on Art and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, including studies on photography, theatre, opera, and music. This collection of books from some of the leading scholars in the field provides a comprehensive overview of the subject how it has evolved over time, and will be of particular interest to students of art and cultural history.
This anthology brings together twenty outstanding works of recent scholarship on the history of the visual arts in the United States from the colonial period to 1945. The selected essays--all written within the past two decades--reflect the interdisciplinary character of current art historiography in America and the variety of approaches that contribute to the dynamism in the field. The authors take up diverse subjects--from colonial portraits to nineteenth-century sculptures of women to photographic images of New York--and invite those with a general knowledge of the history of American art to think more deeply about art and culture. Employing many interpretive methodologies, including iconology, social history, structuralism, psychobiography, and feminist theory, the contributors to this volume combine close analysis of specific art objects or groups of objects with discussion of how these works of art operated within their cultural contexts. The authors consider the works of such artists as John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock as they assess how paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs have carried meaning within American society. And they investigate how the conceptualization, production, and presentation of works of art both inform and are informed by prevailing attitudes toward the role of the arts and the artist in American culture.
The energy and optimism of the new nation are abundantly apparent in this catalogue. It features some of the icons of American art, such as John Singleton Copley's The Copley Family and Gilbert Stuart's portraits of the first five presidents. Numerous paintings, including Benjamin West's Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye (Captain David Hill), are discussed from a new perspective, the result of information culled from letters, wills, and other previously unpublished documents. The author offers new interpretations of some works, among them Charles Willson Peale's portrait of the Baltimore couple Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming. The volume is richly illustrated, with carefully selected comparative illustrations.
This critical and cultural overview of American landscape and travel literature draws on sources from the 17th through 19th centuries, and includes diaries and journals, travelogues, guide-books, essays, lectures and poems. The material includes writings on the Puritan response, pre-colonial eighteenth century accounts, the immediate post-colonial period, expeditions, surveys, the picturesque and the sublime, wilderness literature, the West, the South, New England, Transcendentalism, California, the Hudson River School, Luminism, the Rocky Mountains and Plains. Also includes maps.
