American Views: Essays on American Art - Hardcover

Wilmerding, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691040907 ISBN 13: 9780691040905

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1991

Synopsis

A leading figure in American art scholarship, John Wilmerding has been instrumental in the acceptance of American painting as a special area of art history, and has brought many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American artists to public attention. American Views is a richly illustrated anthology of his work.

About this title

About the Author

John Wilmerding, Princeton University's first Christopher Binyon Sarofim '86 Professor in American Art and visiting curator at the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum, was deputy director of the National Gallery of Art from 1983 to 1988.

Reviews

George Bellows's assertive boxing pictures, John F. Peto's obsessive imagery of Abraham Lincoln, George Caleb Bingham's folksy scenes of mid-19th-century America and Winslow Homer's elemental seascapes all seem to hint that American art has a national character, the stated theme of these erudite essays. Yet Princeton art professor Wilmerding only fitfully pursues that connective thread. Twelve of these 19 essays are from exhibition catalogues, others appeared in scholarly or popular magazines. Completely at home with his material, Wilmerding underscores the poignant magic of Thomas Eakins's late portrait, finds parallels between luminism and the imagery of Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, and looks at ship painter Fitz Hugh Lane, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and such artists as Albert P. Ryder, Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. With 224 halftones and 29 color plates, this handsome volume will interest connoisseurs and general art lovers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

American painters of the 18th and 19th centuries gave their viewers introspective and objective, aesthetic and historic images of inspiration and aspiration. This collection of essays, written over the past two decades for a variety of publications, considers overall themes and places as well as individual artists and specific works. It is also a guidebook, presented with insight and enthusiasm, to the evolving methodology of American art history. From Cole to Bellows, Mount Desert Island to Boston Harbor, the views are as vital and expressive as the images they examine. Since many of these essays are no longer in print, this collection is highly recommended for all art libraries and large general collections.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691040907
• ISBN 13: 9780691040905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382