Picturing a nation : art and social change in nineteenth-century America / David M. Lubin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lubin, David M., author.

Contributor:

Yale University Press, publisher.

Series:

Yale publications in the history of art (Unnumbered)

Yale publications in the history of art

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Painting, American--19th century.

Painting, American.

United States--Social life and customs--19th century--Pictorial works.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 364 pages) : 184 illustrations (chiefly color)

Other Title:

Picturing a nation : art and social change in 19th-century America

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [1994]

Summary:

"When artists depict the world around them, says David Lubin, their images necessarily respond to the underlying social conflicts of their time. Lubin here examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings at once embraced and, paradoxically, resisted dominant social values. The artists considered-- John Vanderlyn, George Caleb Bingham, Robert Duncanson, Lilly Martin Spencer, Seymour Guy, and William Harnett-- came from a variety of backgrounds: several began in the working class, some were immigrants, three hailed from the West, one was an African-American, another was a woman. Drawing on letters, diaries, newspaper reviews, conduct manuals, poetry, fiction, and political speeches, as well as on modern critical theory, Picturing a Nation describes the America that created these artists and that these artists helped to create. Insisting on the complexity of nineteenth-century culture, Lubin provides multiple interpretations of individual paintings in a manner both subtle and revealing. His analyses take into account the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child raising, its racial disharmony, territorial expansion, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America. He argues that the paintings speak to us today in contradictory voices because such was the nature of the societies that produced and received them"--Publisher's description.

Contents:

The politics of method

Labyrinths of meaning in Vanderlyn's Ariadne

Bingham's Boone

Reconstructing Duncanson

Lilly Martin Spencer's domestic genre painting in antebellum America

Guys and dolls : framing femininity in post-Civil War America

Masculinity, nostalgia, and the trompe l'oeil still-life paintings of William Harnett.

Notes:

Description based on print record and online resource (A&AePortal, viewed on May 10, 2018).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780300235852

0300235852

OCLC:

1042081282