American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

Weinberg, H. Barbara, and Carrie Rebora Barratt, eds., with essays by Carrie Rebora Barratt, Margaret C. Conrads, Bruce Robertson, and H. Barbara Weinberg (2009)

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Book of the Year Award (ForeWord) in Art (2009)

Publication Details

Description

Accompanying a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 presents nearly two hundred extraordinary pictures that tell stories of ordinary people engaged in commonplace tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in thirty-five years, this richly illustrated volume features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, John Sloan, and George Bellows, as well as notable examples by some of their key colleagues. These artists captured the temperament of their respective eras, describing and defining in their best works the character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities from the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I. The authors—all distinguished curators and scholars—look at how painters told stories through their selections of settings, players, and action, and various narrative devices. They also consider the artists' responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations. The persistence of certain themes—childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the attainment and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art—underscores evolving styles and standards of storytelling.

Divided into four chronological sections, the book begins with the years surrounding the American Revolution and the birth of the new republic, when painters such as Copley, Peale, and Samuel F. B. Morse incorporated stories within the expressive bounds of portraiture. During the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War decades from about 1830 to 1860, Mount, Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others painted genre scenes featuring lighthearted narratives that growing audiences for art could easily read and understand. From 1860 to 1877, artists like Eastman Johnson, Homer, and Eakins responded to the Civil War and, going forward, encoded Reconstruction and the Centennial in pictures designed to help heal the nation's spirit. After the Centennial, Homer and Eakins—joined by colleagues who included William Merritt Chase, Sargent, Cassatt, Sloan, and Bellows—explored new subjects and narrative modes in the increasingly cosmopolitan age leading up to World War I. The result is a visually compelling account of the stories American artists chose to tell, how they told them, and how those stories have been read by observers over time.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword
Lenders to the Exhibition
Contributors to the Catalogue
Preface and Acknowledgments

Inventing American Stories, 1765–1830
Carrie Rebora Barratt

Stories for the Public, 1830–1860
Bruce Robertson

Stories of War and Reconciliation, 1860–1877
Margaret C. Conrads

Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915
H. Barbara Weinberg

Bibliography
Works in the Exhibition
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

H. Barbara Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Carrie Rebora Barratt is Curator, American Paintings and Sculpture, and Manager, The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Margaret C. Conrads is Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

Bruce Robertson is Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Consulting Curator, Department of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Press reviews

The New York Times

"... an imaginative synthesis of usually contentious approaches. The social and historical are attended to without ignoring quality and progressiveness, all in eminently readable, clear-eyed prose ..."

Maine Antique Digest

"... an excellent bibliography, referencing authorities and resources ..."

Choice Reviews Online

"The catalogue is beautifully produces and will be a valuable resource for the general public and high school and undergraduate teaching. ... Highly recommended."

The New York Review of Books

"... more social history than art. We are to see how artists mirrored concerns and illusions current in the culture of this or that generation. So, during the period of the Revolution and the early Republic, we follow as artists served their audiences with images of industrious and dynamic individuals and then, from the 1830s on, we look at images—or, as the catalog puts it, 'stories'—the culture asked for about the relationship of whites and blacks, or the way backwoodsmen tamed the wilderness."

The Association of Art Museum Curators

"... beautiful ..."

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Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886)

Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828)

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)

Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926)

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880)

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Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting

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Timelines (3)

The United States and Canada, 1800–1900 A.D.

The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

The United States, 1600–1800 A.D.

Exhibition

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

Between the American Revolution and World War I, a group of British colonies became states, the frontier pushed westward to span the continent, a rural and agricultural society became urban and industrial, and the United States—reunified after the Civil War under an increasingly powerful federal government—emerged as a leading participant in world affairs. Throughout this complicated, transformative period, artists recorded American life as it changed around them. Many of the nation's most celebrated painters—John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows—along with their lesser-known colleagues captured the temperament of their respective eras, defining the character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities.

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 presents tales artists told about their times and examines how their accounts reflect shifting professional standards, opportunities for study, foreign prototypes, venues for display, and viewers' expectations. Excluding images based on history, myth, or literature, the exhibition emphasizes instead those derived from artists' firsthand observation, documentation, and interaction with clients. These paintings are analogous to original—not adapted—screenplays. Recurring themes such as childhood, marriage, family, and community; the notion of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art illuminate the evolution of American artists' approach to narrative.

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