John Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites
Idle Hours: William Merritt Chase and modern leisure
“Idleness opens up for any one who has eyes to see and a mind to dream a playground of infinite variety,” wrote novelist Arthur Pier in 1904 for the magazine Atlantic Monthly.1 William Merritt Chase had eyes to see the liberating benefits of idleness, and he found motifs of infinite variety in America’s playgrounds. Catching his subjects at rest or …
Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Ponds
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | Fig. 3. Lake George Autumn by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), 1922. Oil on canvas, 15 by 27 inches. © 2013 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Museums are a fairly recent development in human history, dating back scarcely more than two hundred years. But the founding of such institutions has accelerated so …
Rose Fever: The paintings of George Cochran Lambdin
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | After his death in 1896 George Cochran Lambdin was remembered by friends and memorialists alike for his paintings of roses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mr. Lambdin is known wherever there is anything known of American art as the facile princeps in this specialty.”1 At the height of the tea rose craze during …
American genre painting and the rise of ‘average taste’
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Nearly a century and a half after its publication in 1867, Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists is valued today mainly for its wealth of biographical data. But Tuckerman’s pronouncements summarizing the development of American art culture also deserve closer examination. Of particular interest is his reference to “average taste,” a descriptive …