American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience With a New Preface
Barbara Novak
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0195309499
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this distinguished work, which Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review called "surely the best book ever written on the subject," Barbara Novak illuminates what is essentially American about American art. She highlights not only those aspects that appear indigenously in our art works, but also those features that consistently reappear over time. Novak examines the paintings of Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. She draws provocative and original conclusions about the role in American art of spiritualism and mathematics, conceptualism and the object, and Transcendentalism and the fact. She analyzes not only the paintings but nineteenth-century aesthetics as well, achieving a unique synthesis of art and literature.
Now available with a new preface and an updated bibliography, this lavishly illustrated volume--featuring more than one hundred black-and-white illustrations and sixteen full-color plates--remains one of the seminal works in American art history.
Copley much earlier, we become aware of a curious animation of the inanimate. And, again, this animation is not obviously anthropomorphic, as were the trees of the late eighteenth-century picturesque painters, but rather reveals that awareness of spirit in matter which so concerned Emersonian Transcendentalism. Hudson River school salon paintings, more expediently meeting the public need for the ideal and the real, arrived at a hybrid generally referred to as romantic realism. To separate the.
And softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a.
Seen works by a host of artists, including Allston, West, C. R. Leslie, Neagle, Stuart, Sully, Henry Inman, Charles Willson Peale, Charles Bird King, and Thomas Doughty.14 Bloch points out that he could also have seen landscapes attributed to Salvator Rosa, interiors “said to be” by Van Ostade and Teniers, and a portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn.15 At the exhibition of the Artist’s Fund Society of Philadelphia, he might have encountered works by, among others, Joshua Shaw and John Gadsby Chapman.16 A.
The nineteenth century, Homer, like Hopper, achieves mystery through Winslow Homer 147 ostensibly prosaic subject matter—three lady bathers and a dog on the beach. As with Hopper, empty space becomes the carrier of wordless feeling. It has already been noted that the use of space as an emotional vehicle suggestive of imminent danger or simply to arouse vague fears of the unknown enters sporadically into American art, as part of a romanticism that is frequently tied to some form of realism.
A distance. From this distance, the moment yields up not its transience, but its quotient of eternity. This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 11 Thomas Eakins SCIENCE AND SIGHT When Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) visited the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867, he was more interested in the locomotives and machinery than in the art.1 This curiosity about mechanism, with its concomitant respect for fact, led him into serious anatomical studies—like the Renaissance masters who dissected to.