John Davis & Sarah Burns 
American Art to 1900 
A Documentary History

From the simple assertion that ‘words matter’ in the study of visual art, this comprehensive but eminently readable volume gathers an extraordinary selection of words—painters and sculptors writing in their diaries, critics responding to a sensational exhibition, groups of artists issuing stylistic manifestos, and poets reflecting on particular works of art. Along with a broad array of canonical texts, Sarah Burns and John Davis have assembled an astonishing variety of unknown, little known, or undervalued documents to convey the story of American art through the many voices of its contemporary practitioners, consumers, and commentators.
American Art to 1900 highlights such critically important themes as women artists, African American representation and expression, regional and itinerant artists, Native Americans and the frontier, popular culture and vernacular imagery, institutional history, and more. With its hundreds of explanatory headnotes providing essential context and guidance to readers, this book reveals the documentary riches of American art and its many intersecting histories in unprecedented breadth, depth, and detail.

Table of Content

Introduction


1. THE COLONIAL ERA


Art in an age of puritanism

The Well-Dressed Puritan

Icons and the Metaphor of Painting

Cotton Mather on Art

Thomas Smith’s Reflection on Death


Dissenting opinions: alternatives to puritan practice

Quaker ‘Rules’ on Tombstones

John Valentine Haidt’s Theory of Painting

Art and the Spanish Conquest


Advertisements

Peter Pelham Scrapes a Mezzotint

Runaway ‘Limners’

John Durand

Work for Women

Public Spectacle


Early responses to portraits


Pioneering artists

John Smibert Documents

Benjamin West on William Williams


Taste and theory

Of the Knowledge of Painting

The Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts


Poems on portraits


Training and the lure of europe

John Singleton Copley: Ambition and Practicality

Charles Willson Peale in London and Philadelphia


2. REVOLUTION AND EARLY REPUBLIC


Defining art

John Adams on the Arts

Public Art for the New Republic: Charles Willson Peale’s

Triumphal Arch

The Place of the Arts in American Society

An Early Scheme for a Museum of Sculpture

Sculptors for the Capitol

Wertmüller’s Danaë and ‘Nudities’

‘Native’ Subjects vs. Continental Taste

A Plan for Government Patronage of History Painting


Citizens: documents on portrait painting

Bushrod Washington Commissions a Portrait

George Washington: The Image Industry

Ralph Earl and Reuben Moulthrop: Connecticut Itinerant Painters

Joshua Johnson Advertises

Gilbert Stuart: Eyewitness Accounts

President Monroe Discusses American Artists

Charles Willson Peale’s Advice to Rembrandt Peale

Chester Harding: Self-Made Artist


Artistic identity, artistic choices

Benjamin West: A New World Genius Conquers the Old

Benjamin West, Patriarch of American Painting

John Trumbull Paints Revolutionary History

Washington Allston’s Southern Roots

Washington Allston and the Miraculous Sublime

Washington Allston in Boston

Washington Allston’s ‘Secret Technique’

Washington Allston’s Idealism

John Vanderlyn’s Bid for Fame

John Vanderlyn Paints an American Epic

John Vanderlyn’s Panorama

Samuel Morse’s The House of Representatives

Rembrandt Peale’s The Court of Death


The establishment of artistic categories

Landscape

Charles Willson Peale’s Moving Pictures

Timothy Dwight Views Greenfield Hill

The American Gothic Landscapes of Charles Brockden Brown

The Earliest Guide to Sketching Landscape

Still Life: Raphaelle Peale

Genre: John Lewis Krimmel


Early institutions

Philadelphia

Charles Willson Peale’s Museum

The Columbianum

Quaker City Arts Organizations, c. 1810

New York: The American Academy of the Fine Arts

Boston: John Browere’s Gallery


3. ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS


Art in a democratic nation

The Importance of the Genres

Art in a Mercantile Culture

Charles Fraser Considers Art, Society, and the Future

William Dunlap Champions the Arts

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Living Art

The Anti–’American School’

Joel Headley Waves the Flag of American Art

On Mechanics and the Useful Arts


Building institutions

The National Academy of Design

The Founding

The Early Years

Growing Polarization

The American Art-Union


Collectors and patrons

Thomas Cole and His Patrons

Thomas Cole Laments the Taste of the Times

William Sidney Mount Chooses a Subject

Instructions for Collectors

James Fenimore Cooper Commissions a Statue

Art and Private Property


4. ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: LANDSCAPE, LIFE, AND SPECTACLE


The american landscape

Literary Landscapes

James Fenimore Cooper’s Forest Primeval

Educating the Gaze: Benjamin Silliman on Monte Video

The Glory of an American Autumn

Romantic Nature

For the Birds: John James Audubon and American Nature

Thomas Cole and the American Landscape

The Poetry of Landscape: Thomas Cole in Verse

Thomas Cole and the Course of Empire

American Sites: Tourist Literature

Tourists in the Landscape

The Railroad in the Landscape

Transcendental Nature

Emerson’s Transcendent Natural World

Nature, Wild and Tame

Asher B. Durand Formulates the American Landscape

The Hudson River School in Public

Facing Nature: Jasper Cropsey and Sanford Gifford

The National Landscape in Repose: John Frederick Kensett

Fitz Henry Lane, Marine Painter Extraordinary


American life

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Native and National Art

William Sidney Mount and the Celebration of National Character

William Sidney Mount’s Thoughts on Art, Life, and Travel Abroad

The Significance of Bumps on the Skull

Walt Whitman on American Painting

David Gilmour Blythe on Modern Times

Lilly Martin Spencer: Making It in New York


Artists of color and the representation of race

The Public Display of Slavery

William Sidney Mount’s Ambivalence on Race

Frederick Douglass on African American Portraiture

The Verses of Dave the Potter

J.P. Ball’s Panorama of Slavery

An Imaginary Picture Gallery

Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South


Artists: advice and careers

Rufus Porter’s Recipe for Mural Painting

Thomas Seir Cummings on Miniature Painting

A Folk Artist Overcomes a Disability

Thomas Sully’s Hints to Young Painters


5. ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: PUBLIC ART AND POPULAR ART


The U.S. government as patron: decoration of the capitol

Horatio Greenough’s George Washington

Lobbying for Capitol Commissions

The Liberty Cap as a Symbol of Slavery

Artists Weigh In on Art in the Capitol


Art in public

Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave

The Public Display of the Nude

George Templeton Strong Visits the National Academy

Too Many Portraits?

Henry James Remembers a New York Childhood


Popular art, edification, and entertainment

Responses to the Daguerreotype

Taste and Print Culture

Daniel Huntington’s Mercy’s Dream

Gift Books and Sentimental Culture

High and Low: Taste in Painting

Currier & Ives: Art Hand in Hand with Business

Oliver Wendell Holmes on Stereographs

The American Museum


6. ANTEBELLUM AMERICA: EXPANDING HORIZONS


International travel and exchange

Düsseldorf and the Düsseldorf Gallery

The Lure of Italy


Manifest destiny


Manufacturing history

American History, Pro and Con

The American Spirit of Emanuel Leutze

Emanuel Leutze’s Clash of Civilizations

Washington Crosses the Delaware: Birth of an Icon


Art on and of the frontier

The Noble Savage/Vanishing Race

George Catlin Portrays the Native Americans

Prince Max and Karl Bodmer among the Mandan

American Indians as Spectacle

American Indians as Pictorial Material

Western Life

George Caleb Bingham:Western Life and Western Politics

Critics on Bingham, East and West

Life on the Mississippi in John Banvard’s Panorama

William Jewett’s Letters from California


Frederic church’s sublime landscapes

Heart of the Andes

After Icebergs with a Painter


7. THE 1860s


Taking stock

The Photograph and the Face

A Sunny View of American Progress in Art

James Jackson Jarves’s The Art-Idea

Henry T. Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists

Sculpture in Mid-century America


Landscape at a crossroads: nature seen through telescope and microscope

The American Pre-Raphaelites

Albert Bierstadt’s Great Picture

Variations on a Scene: John Frederick Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Hill

Too Many Landscapes


Civil war

The War and the Artist

A Southern View of the Arts during War

Photographs of Antietam

Sanitary Fairs

History Painting and the War

Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front


Race

Sojourner Truth Inspires a Sculptor

John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman

Anne Whitney’s Africa

Postwar Painting and Race


Art after conflict

Memorializing the War

The National Academy of Design: Praise and Condemnation

Settling In: Artists in Their Studios

The Conditions of Art in America

Dissatisfaction with Artists

What Does Art Teach Us?

Is Religious Art Still Relevant?


8. THE GILDED AGE: LIFE AND LANDSCAPE AT HOME


Nationalism and home subjects

Eugene Benson’s French Gospel for Truly American Art

Home Subjects and Patriotic Painting

Eastman Johnson’s Formula for Success

Art in the South


Modes of realism

Winslow Homer, All-American

Damnable Ugly: Henry James on Homer

Winslow Homer’s Working Methods

Winslow Homer’s Sea Change

Winslow Homer’s Savage Nature and Primal Scenes

Thomas Eakins in Europe

Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer Meets Thomas Eakins

Eadweard Muybridge’s Serial Photographs


Race and representation

Robert Duncanson and ‘Passing’

Edward Bannister and George Bickles:

Discrimination and Acceptance

Winslow Homer: Painting Race

Henry Ossawa Tanner


Landscapes: east and west

The Old Northeast

Armchair Tourism and Picturesque America

Poetry in Paint: Art in Boston

George Inness and the Spiritual in Art

George Inness and the Landscape of the Mind

The New West

William Henry Jackson: Photographing the West

Thomas Moran and the Western Sublime

Frederic Remington’s Wild West

Cultural Intersections: Native Art and the White Imperial Gaze


9. THE GILDED AGE: ART WORLDS AND ART MARKETS


Art on the market

French Art in New York

Buy American

Art as Commodity

Artists Broker Their Work

American Artists: Starving or Selling Out

Art World Diaries: Jervis Mc Entee and J. Carroll Beckwith


Studio life and art society

New Men and Women in New York

Artists and Models

William Merritt Chase’s Super-Studio

Elizabeth Bisland Roving the Studios

The Tile Club: Play as Work

Artists in Their Summer Havens

Varnishing Day


10. THE GILDED AGE: EDUCATION, INSTITUTIONS, AND EXHIBITIONS


Education

A Cautionary Essay on Art Instruction

Boston

William Morris Hunt’s Talks on Art

The Massachusetts Drawing Act of 1870

Chicago

Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago

New York

Labor and Art on the Lower East Side

Lemuel Wilmarth on the Life Class

Breaking Away: The Art Students League

Philadelphia

The School of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

The Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art

San Francisco

A Deaf Artist in San Francisco


Art institutions

Young Turks: The Formation of the Society of American Artists

The Need for American Museums

George Inness on Art Organizations


The philadelphia centennial and the colonial revival

E. L. Henry Dreams of the Past

The Centennial Exhibition

The Colonial Revival Landscape


11. COSMOPOLITAN DIALOGUES


Internationalism

The Tariff Controversy

Internationalist Backlash

The Return from Europe

Friedrich Pecht: A German Critic on American Art

Americans Abroad


Art education

Germany

The Munich School

France

Will Low Remembers Barbizon

J. Alden Weir Writes Home about Jean-Léon Gérôme

Elizabeth Boott Studies with Thomas Couture

Kenyon Cox Struggles in Paris

May Alcott Nieriker’s Tips for Study in Paris

Student Life at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

A Midwesterner in the City of Light


The nude

Kenyon Cox’s Lonely Campaign for the Nude

Anthony Comstock vs. Knoedler & Co.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens Resigns


Arch-expatriates

James Mc Neill Whistler, Expatriate Extraordinaire

Art on Trial: James Mc Neill Whistler vs. John Ruskin

James Mc Neill Whistler’s Platform

James Mc Neill Whistler and the Critics

John Singer Sargent, Man of the World


New women in art

Women Sculptors in the Eternal City

A Feminist Looks at Harriet Hosmer

Women Artists, Woman’s Sphere

Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman

Cecilia Beaux: Becoming the Greatest Woman Painter

Should Women Artists Marry?

The Art Workers’ Club for Women

Advice for Women Photographers


12. NEW MEDIA, NEW TASTEMAKERS, NEW MASSES


Critical voices

Eugene Benson

Earl Shinn on Criticism

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer Assesses

the Progress of American Art

Sylvester Koehler Reflects on a Decade of American Art

William Howe Downes and Frank Torrey Robinson’s

‘Critical Conversations’


The little media

Watercolor

The American Taste for Watercolor

A Child’s View of the Watercolor Show

Pastel

The Society of American Painters in Pastel

James Wells Champney on Pastels

Etching

The ‘First’ American Etching

Two Views on Etching

Women Etchers: Mary Nimmo Moran

Otto Bacher on Whistler in Venice

Wood Engraving


Popular art and its critique

The Nation vs. Prang & Co.

John Rogers, the People’s Sculptor

The Trouble with Monuments

William Harnett’s After the Hunt and The Old Violin

The Gap between Professionals and the Public

John George Brown, the Public’s Favorite


In the magazines: the new illustrators

In Defense of Illustration

Howard Pyle’s Credo

Charles Dana Gibson, All-American Illustrator

Women in Illustration

amateur or artist? debates on photography

Amateurs

Pictorialism


13. BEAUTY, VISION, AND MODERNITY


The aesthetic movement

Oscar Wilde’s American Tour

Advice to Decorators

Poking Fun at Aestheticism

Aesthetic and Industrious Women

Japonisme

John La Farge’s Revolution in Stained Glass


Impressionism: critical reception

American Artists Confront Impressionism

French Impressionism Comes to America


Impressionism: american practices

The Americanization of Impressionism

William Merritt Chase, Seeing Machine

Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes


Impressionism: eclectic practices

Genealogies of Tonalism

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Choice Spirit

Praise for John Twachtman

Refinement in Boston: Edmund Tarbell

The Sensuous Color of John La Farge


Art colonies

Summer Colonies

Vacationing with Art in Shinnecock Hills

Living the Life of Art in Cornish


Beyond the threshold: visionaries and dreamers

William Rimmer: Angels and Demons

Elihu Vedder, Mystical Joker

Albert Pinkham Ryder: The Myth of the Romantic Primitive


14. IMPERIAL AMERICA


The world’s columbian exposition

Experiencing the Fair

Popular Art at the Fair


Mural painting

Edwin Howland Blashfield Defines Mural Painting

Kenyon Cox Negotiates a Commission


Public sculpture

The Farragut Monument

The National Sculpture Society

Karl Bitter on Sculpture for the City

A Victory Monument over Fifth Avenue


Retrospectives and prospects

California vs. the East Coast

The Clarke Sale Cements the Value of American Art

American Art Poised for a New Century

Surveying the Century: Samuel Isham and Charles Caffin


Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Index

About the author

Sarah Burns is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University. She is the author of Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (UC Press), Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, and Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. John Davis is Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College. He is the author of The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture.