Grant Wood, Parson Weems' Fable (1939)

LINK: Steven Biel
Parson Weems Fights Fascists
http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-04/biel/

The Most Famous American Paintings

American Gothic, Grant Wood 1930

Christina's World , Andrew Wyeth 1948

LINK:
"Wyeth's World" Smithsonian Magazine 2006


Washington Crossing the Delaware

Emanuel Leutze 1851

LINK:
Washington’s Crossing An excerpt for President’s Day weekend Introduction: The Painting

Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother 


James McNeill Whistler 1871

Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper






Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol 1962

LINK:

The Origin of Andy Warhol's Soup Cans or The Synthesis of Nothingness

The Atheneum, Gilbert Stuart 1796

Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Raphaelle Peale (1817)

LINK:
Father and Son: The Relationship of Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale

Raphaelle Peale, Still Life: Strawberries, Nuts &c. (1822)

LINK:
Raphaelle Peale's "Strawberries, Nuts, &c.": A Riddle of Enlightened Science

Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea - A Deception (After the Bath) (1822)

Link:
Raphaelle peale's Venus Rising from the Sea: Further Support for a Change in Interpretation

Charles Bird King, Poor Artist’s Cupboard (1815)

Charles Bird King: An Appreciation

The Itinerant Artist (1825)

Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip (1872)

(Butler)

Because it seems the quintessential embodiment of the American spirit, this painting is one of Winslow Homer's most discussed and reproduced works. As one of our greatest artists, Homer and his life are justifiably the subject of a voluminous body of scholarly writing. Snap the Whip, dating from just about the mid-point of his life, tells us a good deal about some of the critical transitions in his artistic development at that time. However familiar and appealing such a work seems to us, it delights and informs with each new look we bring to it. One of the reasons it is so well known is that it exists in several versions: a large figure drawing for the central group of boys (1872, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York), a finished oil study (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the final Butler Institute canvas, and another figure drawing believed to be a cartoon (Fig. 1), for the nearly exact replica executed as a wood engraving and published in Harper's Weekly, September 20, 1873 (Fig. 2). In addition, there are a few closely related works also dating from the early seventies, School Time (n.d., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Va.) and Country School (1871, Saint Louis Art Museum). As Homer moved from drawing to study to larger painting, he made a number of compositional adjustments and refinements, a characteristic process for him in his treatment of a subject in different media or scales. For example, there is only one tumbling figure to the left in the Cooper-Hewitt and Metropolitan images, and five instead of four boys in the central grouping. Homer began the oil study by including the background hillside, which he then painted out, possibly to keep some spaciousness in this small format. Clearly, the larger size of the Butler Institute's painting allowed him to maintain the mountain setting, a formal echoing of the curving diagonal line of boys in the foreground.

From his early training as a draftsman and printmaker in Boston and subsequent experience as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Homer entered his artistic maturity with a consummate skill for compositional organization and telling detail. Here he fuses in perfect equilibrium the three principal elements of his painting-mountains cape, school building, and figures-both as subject and as design. This tripartite balancing has a further expression in the whip line itself: the three anchoring boys at the right, the four running figures in the middle, and the two flying off at the left. As Jules Prown has shown us, Homer's visual theme is that of interdependence and interconnections, held and broken, among human beings. Painted just as the artist was moving from his own youth into middle age, this, and a number o related images from the mid-1870s, suggests he increasingly had in mind his own sense of relatedness and separateness within family and society. As obviously lighthearted, dynamic, and spontaneous as Snap the Whip appears in both form and content, a number of subtle internal tensions heighten its meaning; the play of stillness and motion, running and falling, stones and flowers, interior and exterior, wilderness and construction, physical and mental. This latter contrast is especially pertinent, for the game is taking Place during a midday break indicated by the shadows of a high sun-from the disciplines of learning inside the schoolhouse behind.

Speculation about the location has proposed Easthampton, Long Island, and upstate New York, where Homer had painted at the beginning of the 1870s. But both the hilly landscape and the sketch for a later schoolteacher picture are more specifically associated with the inland location, though typically Homer generalizes his image beyond the moment. At this time there was nostalgia for the disappearing "little red schoolhouses' contrasted with significant reforms taking place in American education, the new role of the teacher, and changes in the curriculum emerging in the decades after the Civil War.  Homer must have thought more broadly about these matters, for this thematic series of paintings depicted play as well as study, freedom as well as detention, the teacher alone and with students, and the schoolhouse as a classroom, a solitary building, and a backdrop. Indeed, its clean cubic form stands as a central focus of order, proportion, and intellectual clarity within the encircling arms of boys and mountainside.

Along with Mark Twain's writings, Homer's pictorial visions in the 1870s are among America's supreme celebrations of youth and the cult of the "good bad boy" of the time, when humor mixed with serious truths, and play, like work, held risk as well a pleasure. We cannot be certain how much Homer identified with his subjects then, as we know he did in later decades, but the critical issue of aloneness versus community that seems to underlie works like Snap the Whip and Dad's Coming (1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was one that his life and art would face from here on out. Significantly, after Snap the Whip, there would never be another painting of a large and active group of figures in Homer's art.

JOHN WILMERDING (Butler Institute of Art website)

(Metropolitan)

William Sidney Mount, Cider Making (1840)

Link:
Banks, Politics, Hard Cider, and Paint


"It is my conclusion that this
man, a merchant, banker, and literary amateur named
Charles Augustus Davis, commissioned Cider Making
in order to celebrate the stunning victory of the Whig
party over the Jacksonians in the election of I840. It is
my further belief that the picture not only speaks
directly to the event of that election, but contains sym-
bols that were as immediately recognizable to the
American electorate of the time-particularly the New
York section of it-as
in the I950S a button reading I LIKE IKE was."

William Sidney Mount, The Painter's Triumph (1838)

The farmer is identified by his
whip and clothes; hat, neckerchief, vest, and loose-
fitting, cuffed trousers-all in good condition-
denote the prosperous yeoman. In contrast, the
figure of the painter projects the urban, cultured
type in his "indoors" dress: cravat and frilled shirt,
tailed coat, and tapered, tight-fitting pantaloons
with stirrups.6 The contrast establishes that the
farmer is a visitor from the natural, physical world


outside the artificial, intellectual studio world. Al-
though the figures may represent specific individ-
uals, their identities are unimportant. They are
objectified, typecast as character actors. The Paint-
er's Triumph is about William Sidney Mount as
the new American artist type...


Link:
The Painter's Triumph: William Sidney Mount and the Formation of a Middle-Class Art

Winslow Homer, Prisoners From the Front (1866)

...all of his Civil War work carries the flavor and conviction of actuality.


Homer's painting made sense, as no other painted image did in the same degree, of the fundamental issues of that conflict. It did so because he discarded the conventional subjects of battle paintings or modes of heroic typification for a prosaic encounter between two (so far as most of his critics were concerned) anonymous figures, and because he framed and explained his subject by devices of psychological and sociological analysis that are counterparts in their modernity to the modernity of the subject they were used to describe and thus peculiarly fitted to its elucidation. Contemporary critics did not use these terms, of course, but they repeatedly commented both upon the psychological relations between the two officers, and the regional and social differences which they so clearly exemplified.

--Cikovsky

Link to essays:
C. Colbert, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1998)
Nicolai Cikovsky, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1977)



He was an unusual general, slight of build with a peaceful, boyish face, colorless cheeks without a typical general's beard, and a thin voice. He dressed informally, often wearing a "checked flannel lumberjack shirt"^[1] under an unbuttoned uniform coat. (Wikipedia on Francis Channing Barlow)



...Colonel Theodore Lyman, who happened to be Barlow's classmate
at Harvard (Class of 1855), told of his first encounter
with Barlow in the army: "As we stood under a big
cherry tree, a strange figure approached; he looked like
a highly independent mounted newsboy; he was attired
in a flannel checked shirt; a threadbare pair of trousers,
and an old blue kepi; from his waist hung a big cavalry
sabre....It was General Barlow."

--Cikovsky

William Sergeant Kendall, Quest (1910)

For Eakins's Academy students who later became sculptors, his teaching made only a limited contribution to their development. Their studies at the Academy consisted of a brief stint in the antique class and longer hours in the dissecting room and modeling classes. It was understood that the sculpture students would learn advanced techniques and styles in Europe. The mature works of most of Eakins's sculpture students, in spite of the various styles and media they employed, have in common a thorough understanding of human anatomy. All of the sculptors were interested in the physical details which gave the subject character and individuality. Although Sergeant Kendall'sQuest (cat. no. 236), a wooden polychromed figure, represents an ideal rather than a person, the artist has also created a strong likeness of the model which belies the generalized title.
--Thomas Eakins and The Academy

By Louise Lippincott (1976)

Winslow Homer, The Life Line (1884)

 Students of the symbolist movement rarely enjoy the luxury of being able to identify the fixed iconographic sources employed in earlier art; instead they must draw inferences from allusions to traditional emblems that are often veiled or transformed in the quest for a more personal, intimate content. Jules Prown equates the spume that ascends behind the entangled couple in TheLife Line (fig. 9), for example, with aspirations towards immateriality and transubstantiation. Salvation in the spiritual, as well as in the physical, sense results from a collective confrontation with the elements undertaken by both the seaman and those on shore who operate the breeches buoy. 
--

Winslow Homer, Reluctant Modern

Charles Colbert 2003

Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt (1893)

The important picture of the year 1893 was "The Fox Hunt." It has been variously known as the " Fox and Crows" and "Winter." The subject of this work is very novel, and requires a word of explanation as to the fact in natural history of which it is a dramatic illustration. In the depths of winter, when for long intervals the ground is covered with snow in Maine, it has been observed that a flock of halfstarved crows will occasionally have the temerity to attack a fox, relying on their advantage of numbers, the weakened condition of the fox, and the deep snow, which makes it peculiarly difficult for the victim either to defend himself or to escape. This, then, is the curious occurrence that Homer took for the subject of his picture, which is as original and forcible as the rest of his productions. In the snow which covers the foreground, near the shore, a weary and harassed fox is running painfully along, in his vain effort to find a refuge from his approaching foes. Two savage crows already hover nearly over him, ready to strike, and the rest of the hungry flock is seen coming rapidly to the spot from the direction of the shore. The canvas is large enough to permit the representation of a life-size fox, and the reddish color of his coat and brush in the midst of the expanse of white makes an interesting point in the color scheme. The ocean is visible in the distance, and overhead is a dark gray wintry sky, in which there are only two small rifts, allowing a cold silvery light to fall on the water near the left side of the picture. The green surf breaks on the rocks and throws up a cloud of spray. There is something uncommonly impressive and solemn about this stern and frigid landscape, and it seems a fit theatre for the impending catastrophe. The painting of the drifted snow in the foreground is exceedingly interesting in the delicate gradations of the values on the undulating surface, in the delicacy of its color, which is apparently very simple, yet is full of variety. The sky also is one that perhaps no other painter except Homer would have the courage to oppose to such a foreground, or, rather, that few other painters would be able to put in its right place.

Mr. Fowler cites this picture as an example of the fine sense of quantities in space that characterizes so markedly much of Homer's best work. "The disposition of the forceful spots in this rectangle is most happy," he writes. "The strong and daring mass of black offered by the crows in the upper right-hand corner, suggesting an even greater volume to the mass by the partly disappearing wings and the approaching numbers of crows — this black, modified and broken by the reflected light on the feathers and the surface light on the beaks, is further distributed by the accents of dark carried to the ears and left forepaw of the fox with fine judgment and effect. So much for the strong and organic notes of the picture. Nothing could show better control of these forcible accents than the manner in which the artist has chosen to place them on the canvas and then given them cohesion by silhouetting these telling spots of black against a darkened sky, and placing the lighter tonal value  

of the fox against the snow. The space in front of the fox suggests much distance for his apprehensive flight — the very direction of his head and ears unites these two active quantities of the scene."1
William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Hiomer, 1911

.............................................................................................................

Dapper, small, inquisitive, shrewd, I see his portrait in the furry animal in the wonderful Fox Hunt.  Sometimes Maine winters were so severe that flocks of starving crows attacked foxes, and in Homer's view of the drama, two nightmare black birds (the nightmare of the flying black penis) swoop on a dainty fox encumbered in drifts of white snow.
--Thomas B. Hess. "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Winslow Homer Honey" New York Magazine June 11, 1973
.........................................................................................................
I found very disturbing Thomas Hess's review of the Winslow Homer Exhibit at the Whitney Museum.  While I don't wish to quarrel with Hess's reasonably plausible (although reductivist and sophomorically Freudian) interpretation of Homer's themes.  I feel it is a pity he allowed his view of the work to blind himself and his readers to its great pictorial beauty.


There is something depressingly cynical about finding "the nightmare of the flying black penis" in Homer's Fox Hunt while ignoring the painting's exquisite color and patterning (clearly influenced by Japanese prints), or in failing even to mention Homer's mastery of watercolor technique.  As for equating Homer with "amateurs and primitives" whose lack of control over their subject matter allows repressed or confused eroticism to surface, is Mr. Hess unfamiliar with Leonardo's St. John the Baptist?  What work of art does not reveal something unintended by its creator? 
Jilly Becker
Brooklyn
--Letter in New York Magazine July 2 1973
.............................................................................................................



Homer (1836-1910)
imagined nature, now immeasurably dis-
tanced from the world of Emerson, as a
cold and amoral environment of chance
and brutality, devoid of justice, except for
the inescapable rules of force.





Link:
Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics

Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (1877)

Jean-Leon Gerome: Selling Slaves in Rome (1867)

The Story of Pygmalion and Galatea (circa 1890)

Phrynne Before the Aereopagus 1861






Thomas Eakins
Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing Mask, c. 1865-66 





Gerome is a technically brilliant but banal story-teller, Eakins is a profoundly seeking artist,
whose search represents at the same time a different level of human insight.

--Art History without Value Judgements: Some Recent Appraisals of 19th Century Art

Author: Alfred Neumeyer

In the case of Gerome's Chessplayers compared to
Eakins' painting of the same subject Ackerman again
comes to the conclusion that "It is almost the same . ."
(p. 243). For identical reasons as in the previous examples
Eakins' picture is, however, just the opposite-a com-
pletely integrated oneness of content and form in an or-
ganized whole.

To see Gerome reincluded in our picture of the 19th
century is historically desirable but his work must be
measured against that of an Ingres of a Meissonier and
only then can his place become clear. His compositions
usefully can be compared to an Eakins but at closer ex-
amination the superficial likeness reveal the deeper
differences of character and style.

Susan McDowell: Photo of Samuel Murray, Thomas Eakins, and Willliam O'Donovan

Eakins graduated fifth in his class of fourteen. Many of his classmates enlisted to serve in the Union Army, but Benjamin Eakins, endorsing his son's wish to become an artist, paid for a substitute.
		Eakins lived in a neighborhood surrounded by Quaker families. Quaker culture was part of the normal life of Philadelphia. It's likely Eakins knew many Quakers that were exempt from service in the Civil War because of their religious faith.									AMY B. WERBEL, Ph.D. Art Historian, St. Michael's College
		The fact that an exemption was secured for him not to join the Union Army -- I think would have been the obvious choice -- was not so unusual. It probably strikes the modern mind as maybe cowardice or maybe special treatment. But it was done frequently and the usual sort of exchange was 300 dollars. And sometimes a replacement, a specific replacement often was secured. He indeed was paid and he went in place of the individual.									THOMAS J. SCHLERETH, Ph.D Historian, University of Notre Dame

PBS Website (http://www.pbs.org/eakins/t_1857_civil_war.htm)

'Lincoln and Grant', bronze sculptures by William Rudolf O'Donovan (men) & Thomas Eakins (horses), 1893-1894, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, New York City

William Rudolf O'Donovan and his bust of Walt Whitman (May 1891). Photograph byThomas Eakins.




One might have thought that so much new biographical data would have helped to resolve any lingering debates surrounding Eakins’s life, personality, and achievement. But three recent biographies—one by a writer on crime, one by a distinguished historian, and one by a respected specialist in American art—suggest the opposite. It is unsettling to read the books in succession, for they seem to describe three quite different men: a happily married heterosexual; a closeted homosexual married to a lesbian; and a neurotic victim of incest who felt compelled to remove his clothes in public. It is difficult to think of a parallel case of such divergent accounts of a well-known life.

Three Ways of Looking at Thomas Eakins

Christopher Benfey NYRB March 2007
7

Thomas Eakins, The Professional Rehearsal (1883)

Eakins has iron-bound limits in execution, but very remarkable originality. He has boldly seized on subjects never attempted before by artists of his training and parts, such as a water-colour of the national pastime called "Baseball," an oil-painting of an expert sculler seated in his outrigger, a sportsman "Whistling for Plover," and a view of the Delaware river covered with such uncouth sailing craft as factory operatives can obtain when they wish to take a sail. The picture here produced is not his best, but it is far from his worst; perhaps "Chessplayers" and one other, "Listening to Music," surpass it. The people's note is struck again. Here is the stage robbed of all  glamour, the actor and musician in shirt-sleeves, ding and devil-may-care, who tinkle on the zither in preparation for the evening's work.   It is peculiarly characteristic for just that reason, since Mr. Eakins is always inclined to put things as badly as possible, as if he had a perfect hatred of neat and showy outsides.
==Charles de Kay, "Movements in American Painting: The Charles Clarke Collection in New York," The Magazine of Art, 1887

...all amateurs, playing for friends and family in middle class parlors. How heroic! How far from the musicians Degas was painting, contemporaneously, in the bustling opera theaters of Paris. How far away from anything like stardom or fame.

Musicians holding and cradling their instruments are the only embraces we see in Eakins, but the sacredness with which his circle must have held their music--their only connection with the Lyre of Orpheus in the otherwise mundane world of a manufacturing city.

One can only imagine the wheezes, squeaks, and missed notes: the combination of pluck and embarrassment, not only of the performer, but of the audience, which knows that what it has come out to hear is not first rate or virtuoso. In a way, it can all be so depressing. Yet it is also brave. It's how artists live who don't live in New York. Nowadays, we're almost all audience. Eakins' people make their own music.

--Michael Neff, "Thomas Eakins: Realism and the Workmanlike Path to Transcendence," The Drexel Online Journal 2002

Sargent, Eakins, and Rembrandt Peale, Self-Portraits (1906, 1902, 1846)

                                                                                 circa 1885

"I have long been sick and tired of portrait  painting, and while I was painting my own 'mug' I firmly resolved to devote myself to other branches of art as soon as possible."

Thus Mr. Sargent was reported as speaking shortly after he had finished the wellknown self-portrait in the Uffizi Gallery.

--The American Magazine of Art, February 1917

John Singer Sargent, asked to present his self-portrait to the Uffizi, performed the exercise with glacial detachment.

Laura Cumming, A Face to the World:  on self-portraits (2009)

I
In his 1902 "Self Portrait" (National Academy of Design), he wears a shapeless black wool suit. His face has a sallow color of a man who's worked too hard for too little reward. He shows a brave man, burnt out. One yearns to call his image "undaunted," but is forced to see that he is very daunted, indeed.
Michael Neff, "Thomas Eakins: Realism and the Workmanlike Path to Transcendence" Drexel Online Journal 2002




I have always found it a heartbreaking picture, as brutally honest as Rembrandt looking at Rembrandt,.  Eakins is left with few illusions.  He sees himself straight.  One feels that he feels that he has failed, but failed with indefatigable defiance.
--Philip Hamburger, "Eakins in Boston," The New Yorker 1982

My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect, enhanced because unsought.
--Thomas Eakins, 1894, quoted in Elizabeth Johns, "Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life" Washington Quarterly 1987







by Matthew Brady circa 1855