Angels. Tombo s. girlhood in 19th-century american art

Transcription

1 Angels & Tombo s 3 girlhood in 19th-century american art

2

3 3 The Flowering of Girlhood Narratives, holly pyne connor Scholars have long noted that American artists fascination with children began during the Civil War, but the initial interest in girlhood subjects, presented in narrative and genre scenes of everyday life, actually developed a decade earlier, in the 1850s. Commencing with a group of lithographs after paintings by Lilly Martin Spencer, a growing engagement with girlhood was also sparked by an awareness and appreciation of European pictures of children that could be seen in New York City exhibitions and during sojourns abroad. All through the horrors of the war years and the disillusionment of the postwar period, many Americans found solace in reassuring images that captured the perceived security and comfort of home and its female inhabitants; childhood was often presented as an idyllic state enacted in sunny country settings. The 1860s also witnessed the creation of meaningful pictures by Eastman Johnson, John George Brown, and Spencer in which girls appeared in narratives that commented on topical concerns including family, race, and national destiny. This confluence of events elevated girlhood themes to the canon of American art by the last quarter of the century, as girls took center stage in paintings, watercolors, and prints by American masters. Before the 1850s, the depiction of girls was primarily confined to commissioned portraits, which used such gendered objects as flowers, dolls, and pets to define the sitters as pure, docile, and domestic. 1 Genre and narrative paintings, however, expanded traditional views of girlhood by creating sentimental and sometimes thought-provoking narratives, with girls presented as active protagonists in relation to other children and adults. The figures in genre paintings usually represented social types, so they provide additional, meaningful avenues to a deeper understanding of attitudes toward girlhood. During the first half of the nineteenth century, few narrative paintings treated girlhood as their main subject. Only Spencer repeatedly focused on girls and domestic life, subjects that became her specialty. 2 Male genre painters, who were forging an American cultural identity, dealt with masculine themes, including western expansion, hunting, and politics. George Caleb Bingham, Richard Caton Woodville, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, and numerous others almost never painted little girls, inviting speculation that this theme was deemed unworthy of serious consideration by male artists and their patrons. A review of one of the great New York collections of American art, that which Luman Reed amassed from 1832 until his death in 1836, reveals only one painting of a girl, George Whiting Flagg s The Match Girl, 1834 (New-York Historical Society), executed in London. 3 During the same period, boys were popular subjects in the works of William Sidney Mount and David Gilmour Blythe. Mount captured the rowdy activities of country boys, while Blythe focused on urban children, casting them as depraved creatures engaged in disruptive, antisocial behavior. As the art historian Elizabeth Johns noted, Male artists, consistent with their preoccupation with sovereignty, masculine autonomy, and social control, attended to boys. 4 While girls occasionally appear in the art of Fig. 78. (opposite) Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, Sally, c Oil on canvas, 26 x 23 in. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts; Museum purchase 3

4 4 Fig. 82. John George Brown, Crossing the Brook, Oil on canvas, 23 x 141/2 in. George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts; George Walter Vincent Smith Collection. Photograph by David Stansbury

5 Fig. 16. Ammi Phillips, Girl in a Red Dress, c Oil on canvas, 323/8 x 273/8 in. Terra Foundation for American Art 5

6 6 Plate 21. Mary Cassatt, The Reader, Oil on canvas, 32 x 251/2 in. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photograph by Robert LaPrelle

7 Plate 25. Frank Weston Benson, Gertrude, Oil on canvas, 501/8 x 401/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Mrs. William Rodman Fay

8 A Ngels & Tombo s In the aftermath of the Civil War, the American girl seemed transformed at once more introspective and adventurous than her counterpart of the previous generation. She took center stage in the stories of Louisa May Alcott and Henry James at the same moment that contemporary painters, illustrators, photographers, and sculptors asked her to pose. For the first time, girls claimed the attention of genre artists, and girlhood itself seized the imagination of the nation. Although the culture still prized the demure female child of the past, many saw a bolder type as the new, alternate ideal. Girlhood was no longer simple, and the complementary images of angel and tomboy emerged as competing visions of this new generation. Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition organized by the Newark Museum, Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century American Art explores the myriad ways artists portrayed young girls, from the sentimental, innocent stereotype to the free-spirited individual. Works by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, together with those by leading women artists, such as Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt, reveal a new, provocative psychological element not found in early Victorian portraiture, while the mischievous tomboys in Lilly Martin Spencer s paintings and the pure angels in the works of John George Brown underscore the complexity of girlhood and of representing that evanescent phase. Essays by Holly Pyne Connor, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Sarah Burns, and Lauren Lessing consider the historical, social, and literary contexts of the artworks, drawing on sources as varied as etiquette books, poems, censuses, and the histories of medicine and economics. With more than 130 illustrations including paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs this publication is an illuminating exploration of what it meant to be young, female, and American in the nineteenth century. 184 pages, 81/2 x 11 inches Smyth-sewn casebound, with jacket Over 100 full-color reproductions Includes Exhibition Checklist and Index $39.95 US ($43.95 Canada) ISBN Catalog No. A208 Available September 2012 Cover: Abbott Handerson Thayer, Angel, Oil on canvas, 361/4 x 281/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum; Gift of John Gellaty Back cover: John George Brown, Swinging on the Gate, c Oil on canvas, 221/2 x 143/8 in. Taubman Museum of Art; Acquired with funds provided by the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust Newark Museum Artworks individual artists or their estates Printed in China Pomegranate Communications, Inc. Box , Petaluma, CA Pomegranate Europe Ltd. Unit 1, Heathcote Business Centre, Hurlbutt Road Warwick, Warwickshire CV34 6TD, UK [+44] sales@pomeurope.co.uk