Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy

by Barbara Dayer Gallati (Editor), Linda S. Ferber (Contribution by), Ella M. Foshay (Contribution by), Kimberly Orcutt (Contribution by)

Overview

A landmark publication on American art from 1825 to 1870, this is a significant contribution to our understanding of taste and collecting in America during this period. It presents fifty-five paintings from thirty-eight artists drawn from the New York Historical Society's newly restored and superb collection of narrative art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904832768
Publisher:	D Giles Limited
Publication date:	10/27/2011
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	11.80(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004) and a coauthor of Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007).

Linda S. Ferber is vice president and senior art historian of the Museum at the New-York Historical Society. She was formerly Andrew W. Mellon Curator and chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized and coauthored Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007). She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County (2001) and Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement (1998), with Barbara Dayer Gallati.

Ella M. Foshay is an independent art historian. When curator of paintings and sculpture at the New-York Historical Society, she produced the catalog Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (1990) for an exhibition that re-created Reed’s private art gallery as it would have looked in his house in 1835. She is author of, with Barbara Novak, Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Cullen Bryant (2000).

Kimberly Orcutt is curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society, where she organized the exhibition John Rogers: American Stories. She served as assistant curator of American art at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and curated the exhibition Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the Bruce Museum. She is chair emerita of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Louise Mirrer

Preface and Acknowledgments by Linda S. Ferber

Note to the Reader

Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America by Barbara Dayer Gallati

“Nature’s Nation”: American Taste and Landscape Painting, 1825–1876 by Linda S. Ferber

Luman Reed and Robert L. Stuart: A Double Portrait by Ella M. Foshay

Artists’ Biographies and Catalogue Entries by Barbara Dayer Gallati and Kimberly Orcutt

Editorial Reviews

"Makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of this too-often ignored and undervalued class of painting and sculpture"—Bruce Cole, Wall Street Journal

"An important contribution to nineteenth-century American art scholarship"—The Magazine Antiques

"The latest in a sequence of stellar publications that throw open new windows onto the holdings of the New-York Historical Society"—Katherine Manthorne, Professor of American Art, Graduate Center, City University of New York

"Adds greatly to our understanding of how nineteenth-century paintings told stories"—Marc Simpson, Associate Director of the Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williams College.

"Exquisitely illustrated with both recognized and under-appreciated masterpieces"—Holly Pyne Connor, Ph.D., Curator of 19th-Century American Art, Newark Museum

"[Digs] down to expose the tangled roots of taste formation in a disorderly new democracy that was still trying to figure out what should be “American” about American art"—Sarah Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor, Indiana University

"Along the way, we encounter works of art we’ve long considered quaintly irrelevant and are reintroduced to the paintings and sculptures we thought we knew well"—Rebecca E. Lawton, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

From the Publisher