1 option
Moved to tears : rethinking the art of the sentimental in the United States / Rebecca Bedell.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Bedell, Rebecca Bailey, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Sentimentalism in art.
- Art--United States--History.
- Art.
- Themes, motives.
- United States.
- History.
- Art--United States--Themes, motives.
- Art--Themes, motives.
- Genre:
- History.
- Physical Description:
- xi, 220 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2018]
- Summary:
- In 'Moved to Tears', Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, Bedell argues that major American artists-from John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale in the eighteenth century and Asher Durand and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth-produced what was understood in their time as sentimental art. This was art intended to develop empathetic bonds and to express or elicit social affections, including sympathy, compassion, nostalgia, and patriotism. Much sentimental art of this era was animated by and invested with socially transformative ambitions. Trumbull and Peale deployed their sentimental creations in the urgent effort to stabilize the new nation in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Through his work, Tanner opposed the virulent anti-Semitism of fin-de-siecle France. Even artists such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, who had absorbed something of modernist disdain for sentimentalism, were aware of its commercial potential and popular appeal and negotiated complex relations with it.
- Contents:
- The revolutionary art and politics of sentiment: Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull
- Sentiment and social change: slavery, race, and the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner
- Andrew Jackson Downing and the sentimental home
- Sentimental landscapes
- Sentimental Homer
- Strategic sentimentalism: John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-209) and index.
- ISBN:
- 0691153205
- 9780691153209
- OCLC:
- 1032582804
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.