American Art

B

Portraiture

During the last three decades of the 19th century, American portraitists aimed for more than the mere recording of likenesses. Thomas Eakins of Philadelphia, who had studied anatomy with medical students, depicted the distinguished surgeon Dr. Samuel David Gross as he directed an operation before onlookers in the surgical amphitheater of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (The Gross Clinic, 1875, Jefferson Medical College). Gross appears as the great leader of a team of healers. All action occurs around him as he stands at the center, unperturbed. Light appears to flow from his brightly lit, high forehead, expressing the surgeon’s wisdom and kindness as well as his scientific knowledge.

The artist John Singer Sargent received many portrait commissions from wealthy patrons, and he also portrayed social climbers. His portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau (1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art) reveals to the viewer the vanity and self-indulgence of its subject, Virginie Avegno Gautreau. Gautreau, from New Orleans, Louisiana, married a wealthy French businessman and aspired to advance in European society. Her haughty bearing and shockingly low-cut gown made the painting so scandalous that it came to be known simply as Madame X. The extreme whiteness of the skin is accurate, for Gautreau covered her body with a lavender powder to make it look whiter, and hardly ever exposed her skin to the sun. In the Sargent portrait Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast (1882-1883; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), Gautreau’s shoulders are covered by chiffon but her haughty demeanor remains.

Another American painter, who like Sargent worked mainly in Europe, was Mary Cassatt. An independent woman who came from a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Cassatt settled in Paris, became a close friend of French painter Edgar Degas, and exhibited with the French impressionists, whose style she adopted. She often portrayed her sister Lydia and other members of her family on outings, in theaters, and in quiet domestic situations. Cassatt did not depart from the actual colors of objects or dissolve form as much as Claude Monet and other French impressionists did. But like them she showed figures in a moment of time, apparently caught off-guard, as in Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren (1880, private collection).

Of the variety of approaches to portraiture, none in this period was more advanced than that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but denied it because he felt it lacked distinction. Most of his life was spent in Europe, where he adopted the slogan “art for art’s sake.” By this Whistler meant that art need have no other purpose than to please through its beauty. Art, according to Whistler, need not have an instructive or morally elevating subject matter, as most painters before and during his lifetime believed. Whistler called his paintings by the musical terms symphony, nocturne, arrangement, and composition because he claimed that “as music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.” The primary title of the portrait of his mother, Anne Matilda McNeill Whistler, which he painted when she visited him in London, was An Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). It is a nearly monochromatic (single-color) composition of rectangles—the baseboard, the curtain, the picture frames, the rug—that is broken by the asymmetrical profile of the woman. Whistler’s adherence to basic geometric forms in this painting anticipated the minimal art of the 1960s. It is ironic that the portrait of Whistler’s mother, noted in its day for its lack of sentimentality, is regarded today as a glorification of motherhood.

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C

Genre Painting

The pre-Civil War American genre painters, such as Bingham, were more concerned with portraying a way of life than with exploring the inner life of their subjects. But after the war a moodiness appeared in some genre paintings, as it had in the late landscapes of Inness. This meditative atmosphere surrounds the disconnected figures in dimly lit, largely empty interiors painted by African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, as in Interior with Woman Spinning (private collection). From Pittsburgh, the son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner also painted religious subjects, such as the otherworldly Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds (about 1910, Smithsonian American Art Museum). He studied under Thomas Eakins from 1880 to 1882, and in 1891 went to live in Europe, where he felt people would accept an artist of his color more easily.

Winslow Homer is best known for his seascapes, such as High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and his scenes of men struggling against the sea, which emphasize the power of the sea. But he also worked as a genre painter from the end of the Civil War to 1881. During the war he had made illustrations from the battlefield for the magazine Harper’s Weekly. His Veteran in a New Field (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1866), painted just after the war, is full of meaning. An ex-soldier, now a farmer, harvests his wheat with a scythe. But unlike the reaper with a scythe who typically signifies death, the farmer brings forth life and renewal. The painting suggests that swords have been beaten into plowshares. A reaper painted by Homer 12 years later (Reaper, 1878, private collection) is far sunnier in mood and without the symbolic overtones, like the many farm scenes Homer created during the 1870s.

As the frontier began to disappear toward the end of the 19th century, scenes and sagas of the Old West became more popular than ever. But nostalgia had set in. Where Catlin, in paintings of the 1840s and 1850s, had sought to record a way of life, Frederic Remington, who hailed from Canton, New York, revealed a different interest in the West about 50 years later. Remington had gone West and worked as a clerk, then a cowboy and a ranch hand. But he ignored in his art the suffering and hardship undergone by settlers and Native Americans, even at a time when most Native Americans were being sent to reservations. Instead, Remington evoked for people in the Eastern states the sense of a West that never fully existed, a place of never-ceasing romantic excitement.

D

Impressionism

Childe Hassam from Dorchester, Massachusetts, became known as the American Monet because his sensitivity to the effects of light was reminiscent of the French impressionist. Hassam studied in Paris in 1883 and 1884 and lived there from 1886 to 1889, yet his impressionism was really home-grown. He painted primarily American subjects and, unlike European impressionists, stuck to descriptive color, although he borrowed the impressionist technique of cutting off figures and objects by the edge of the painting, much as a snapshot might. After returning to the United States, Hassam helped found an American impressionist group called The Ten. Summers spent on the Isles of Shoals, a group of small rugged islands just off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, provided subjects for many of his paintings. He was drawn especially to tiny Appledore Island, where well-known figures in the arts and literature came to stay. Among those who visited the island were American writers James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley, and actor Edwin Booth. They stayed at a hotel maintained by Celia Thaxter, whose greatest pride was her garden, a plot planted with hollyhocks, poppies, larkspur, crimson phlox, and many other flowers. Hassam painted her as an ample figure in white confidently surveying her garden next to the sea, before a hazy but unbroken sky (Celia Thaxter in her Garden, 1892, Smithsonian American Art Museum). The bright colors, the loose brush strokes used to paint the flowers, and the dappled light display Hassam’s impressionist manner.

Other noted impressionists in America were William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. Chase favored dark tones and a loose, almost slap-dash application of paint. This approach contrasted with the muted palette of whites and grays of Twachtman. In Fishing Boats at Gloucester (1901, Smithsonian American Art Museum), Twachtman represented the sky, water, boats, and buildings along the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in silvery-blue and soft pink tones, unlike the bright colors favored by Monet and other Europeans.

E

Visionary Painting

A group of artists known as the visionaries was united neither by style nor by subject, but by a general approach, a certain cast of mind. Their images evoked an inner dream world conjured from the imagination. Visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when that city was one of the world’s chief whaling ports. Even after he moved to New York City, memories of whaling boats setting forth on dangerous waters seem to have haunted him. He painted lone boats beneath a strangely luminous sky in which the moon appears to emit an eerie glow, as in Moonlight (1887, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Ryder once compared himself to an inchworm crawling upon a leaf, “revolving in the air, feeling for something to reach something.”

Ralph Albert Blakelock, another visionary painter, gave up his medical studies in 1869 when he was 21 and journeyed to California, crossing Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. He was not part of an expedition, as Bierstadt and Moran had been, and is said to have lived among Native Americans. In 1872, back in New York City and living in poverty, Blakelock began to depict the Native Americans he had seen on the Great Plains as tiny passive figures within a vast mysterious, moon-drenched realm, as in Moonlight (1880s or early 1890s, Brooklyn Museum of Art). These figures were very different from the active people in the paintings of Catlin and Remington. Blakelock spent the last 20 years of his life, except for a few months, in a sanitarium for the insane.

F

Sculpture

Fewer changes occurred in sculpture after the Civil War than took place in painting. Neoclassicism, the style that had prevailed earlier in the century, did not entirely disappear. The subject of most sculpture was still the human figure, generally a hero or heroine or an allegorical personage. One of the most skillful sculptors of the period was William Rimmer, an eccentric born in Liverpool, England, who came with his family to Massachusetts when he was two years old and was brought up to believe he was the rightful heir to the French throne. No sculptor in his time was better at rendering human and animal anatomy, yet Rimmer gained little popular acceptance because of the disturbing nature of his nude figures. Based on models from classical antiquity, his figures are invariably presented as wounded or dying, as in Falling Gladiator (1861, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Sculptor Edmonia Lewis had a no less remarkable background than Rimmer. Born near Albany, New York, to a Chippewa mother and a black father, Lewis lived for many years among the Chippewa after the death of her mother, then attended Oberlin College. One of her best-known works is the carved marble Hagar (1875, Smithsonian American Art Museum). This biblical figure is dressed in a classical tunic and stands with her hands clasped in gratitude. In the Book of Genesis, Hagar was Abraham’s concubine, who, through the wish of Abraham’s wife Sarah, was sent out of his house into the desert. The subject has special meaning for Lewis, who professed that she had “strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.”

The foremost American sculptor after the Civil War was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who broke from neoclassicism and the limitations it imposed. Born in Ireland, he came to America as an infant. Saint-Gaudens studied in Paris in 1867 and in Florence and Rome from 1870 to 1875, where he became an admirer of the art of the Italian Renaissance. After returning to the United States he set up a studio in New York City. One of his most unusual sculptures is the Adams Memorial (1891, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.), a monument for the grave of Marian Hooper Adams, wife of the writer Henry Adams. The heavily draped seated figure on the monument seems emotionless yet at peace. (Marian Hooper Adams had taken her own life.) The contemplative sculpture was not based on any European memorial, although it may have been influenced by Michelangelo’s figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Years later Adams observed that while the figure was a mystery for most Christian clerics, “any Asiatic would have understood its meaning.” Adams was referring to its representation of peacefulness and remoteness rather than an overt outpouring of grief and mourning.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French from New Hampshire, who worked on some commissions with Saint-Gaudens, was responsible for some of America’s best-known statues commemorating historic events and personages. These include The Minute Men (1875, Concord, Massachusetts) and John Harvard (1884, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Church is best remembered for his colossal marble statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln, authorized by Congress in 1911 for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. An earlier sculpture of a standing Lincoln (1912, Lincoln, Nebraska) is similar to a statue of Lincoln by Saint-Gaudens (1887) in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.