Book/Catalogue

The Painters’ America:  Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910

The painters’ America, as reflected in the paintings of rural and urban life between 1810 and 1910, closely corresponded to the growth of the young nation from a simple agrarian society to an industrialized and urban one.  It was during this time that artists broke away from the traditional European prototypes and fashioned a truly American art, which not only illustrated that period in history but also became part of the fabric of the culture.  In this lively account of American genre painting, Patricia Hills emphasizes not only the work of individual artists but their social context and relation to the changing cultural patterns of the times as well.  Genre painters such as William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, and Winslow Homer shifted from early paintings of carousing villagers, card players, fiddlers, and country peddlers to images of slavery, the Civil War and early Reconstruction.  

            As the century progressed, the themes shifted away from a concern with rural life toward the urban middle class and its recreational and cultural pursuits.  Later painters drew their subjects from the new urbanism and the cosmopolitan attractions of Europe and include such artists as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent.  Included also are works picturing the nascent labor movement by artists Thomas Anshutz and Robert Koehler.  In the early years of the twentieth century, the working-class “common man” again became a major subject in the work of George Bellows, George M. Luks, and John Sloan. 

            The shifts of style that accompanied the thematic transitions and the role of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia are covered in discussion of the works of more than eighty artists who made a major contribution to the artistic tradition of America.

Published by Praeger Publishers to accompany an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that traveled to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Oakland Museum.  Text here adapted from the jacket cover.