American Painting - From its beginnings to the Armory Show

154 Pages·1969·25.324 MB·English

by  Jules David Prown

BOSTONPUBLIC LIBRARY
3 9999 05320 268 3
American
JULES DAVID PROWN
Painting
FROM BEGINNINGS TO THE ARMORY SHOW
ITS
1A -'
mdii
\l
i'
:
PAINTING COLOR HISTORY
o
AMERICAN
PAINTING
From
Beginnings
its
Armory Show
to the
Introduction by
JOHN WALKER
Directorof theNationalGalleryofArt, Washington,D.C.
Text by
JULES DAVID PROWN
Associate Professorof the HistoryofArt
andDirectorofthe PaulMellonCenter
for BritishArt and BritishStudiesat Yale Univesity
The Story of American painting begins in the Colonial
period, in the seventeenth century. "The most obvious
factaboutearly Americanpainting," writes Jules David
Prown, "isthat there was so littleof it. When European
colonists began to establish permanent settlements on
the eastern flank of North America, they had other
things on their minds than the painting of pictures.
Faced wit—h a pressing necessity to—satisfy their primary
life needs food, shelter, clothing they adopted a way
of life and a view of the world that was necessarily
pragmatic. For them the arts seemed dangerously irre-
levant, a distraction from the serious tasks at hand.
That pragmatic attitude has characterized American
culture from its inception to the present day, and has
profoundly affected the trajectory of American art."
That trajectory is traced in detail in the pages of this
book: from the earliest surviving Colonial paintings,
all of them portraits, down to the famous Armory Show
held in New York in 1913. John Walker aptly sums up
the art of these two and a half centuries: "There were
three outstanding Colonial painters: West, Copley, and
Stuart. No artist measured up to them until the second
half of the nineteenth century, when America produced
three more masters of the first rank who worked in
Europe: Mary Cassatt, Whistler, and Sargent. That
same generation brought forth three artists equally
distinguished who remained at home: Eakins, Homer,
and Ryder. The text of this book brilliantly proves that
theseninepaintersmaketheAmericanSchoolillustrious
by any standards."
70
REPRODUCTIONS IN FULL COLOR
Color plate on thejacket
George Caleb Bingham (iSii-iSyg).
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (detail),
about 1843.
The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
Published at the same time
AMERICAN PAINTING
The 20th Century
BY BARBARA ROSE
60 REPRODUCTIONS IN FULL COLOR
Distributed in the United States by
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPAMV
2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 441('2

[
PAINTING COLOR HISTORY
° -
COLLECTION PLANNED AND DIRECTED BY
ALBEKT SKIKA

AMERICAN
PAINTING
From Its Beginnings to the Armory Show
INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN WALKER
TEXT BY
PROWN
JULES DAVID
GENERAL EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: ALEXIS GREGORY
Distributed in the United States by
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
2231 West iioth Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44102
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-80455
PRINTED IN SWITZERLAND
I
Contents
List of Color Plates 7
Introduction 11
The Colonial Period 17
The Federal Period: Americans at Home and Abroad 37
The Search for Identity 55
Art for the People 79
From Art for the Sake of Art to the Ashcan School in
Select Bibliography 135
General Index 141
Ill