America is filled with local history museums, town libraries, and regional art museums containing some of the finest examples of early American portraiture
The unexpected virgin
While in New York recently, Stan Mabry, a fine arts dealer, did a double take. He saw a painting that he had known of for many years, but only as the centerpiece among many works of art in a black-and-white photo of a Paris studio in the 1890s.
James E. Freeman and the painting of sentiment
November 2009 | Thoughout his half-century-long artistic career in the United States and Italy, James E. Freeman (Fig. 2) specialized in creating paintings of sentiment that sought to cross the boundaries dividing different cultures and social classes by engaging emotions, encouraging empathy, and ultimately prompting beneficence.1 Sentimentalism flourished in the antebellum period as a sort of bridge between the overt …
Summer in the Adirondacks
A “Wild, Unsettled Country”: Early Reflections of the Adirondacks, which opened last week, includes a selection of paintings, maps, prints, and photographs that illustrate the untamed Adirondack wilderness discovered by artists, photographers, and cartographers who visited the area in the nineteenth century. While tourists were flocking to Saratoga Springs, near what is today the southern boundary of the Adirondack Park, …
American Indian painting
Between 1879 and 1900 the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs established twenty-four off-reservation boarding schools for American Indian children, among them the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. The schools were intended as a means of absorbing American Indians into the larger society by transforming the children of what were considered savage warriors into fully “civilized citizens.” But …