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Articles
Although a number of American still life artists who gained prominence during the nineteenth century were still active and influential after 1900, the still life genre in America in the early part of the twentieth century was profoundly impacted by…
H. G. Wells, writing this passage in 1933, knew that he was living in a time of absolute and unprecedented transformation. People's daily lives were changing, and this filled the great author and futurist with both excitement and foreboding. He…
In his brief yet wide-ranging career, Theodore Robinson established himself as a major figure in the early years of American impressionism, one of the only artists to work alongside Claude Monet. New York dealer Ira Spanierman, who along with the…
In late November of 1907, New York newspapers trumpeted a controversy that had the art world in an uproar. Headlines exclaimed: "Artist Chase Leaves: Withdraws from the New York School of Art, Which He Founded"; and "Wm. M. Chase Forced…
The variety of decoration found on silver spoons made in America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century is staggering. Beginning with hand worked designs in the 1700s, increased mechanization, innovation and consumer demand in the 1800s led to hundreds…
Art history has long been dominated by male artists. A number of factors prevented women from achieving artistic prominence,1 primary among them was the fact that until the nineteenth century women were denied entrance to schools and academies, and even…
Museum of Early Southern Decorative Art’s founder, Frank Horton, purchased this silver cann marked by Charleston, South Carolina, silversmith Lucas Stoutenburgh (1691–1743) in the 1960s. It is boldly engraved with a coat of arms featuring a rampant lion placed between…
For over two hundred years the Brandywine Valley region has attracted artists, including James Brade Sword, Jasper Cropsey, William T. Richards, Herman Herzog, George Cope, Edward Moran, and many others. The still extant Turner’s Mill in Chadds Ford was the…
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787) was the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America and progenitor of one of the most influential Pennsylvania German families in history (Fig. 1). This year marks the 300th anniversary of his birth. Three of Henry’s…
During his lifetime, landscape painter William Keith (1838–1911) had a reputation that spread widely across the country from his home base in San Francisco. Especially towards the end of his career in the early twentieth century, his works were sought…
Hand-made objects, long subservient to an artificial hierarchy of the arts established in the Renaissance, underwent a paradigm shift in the postwar period, defined here as 1945 to 1969, and became an assertive form of artistic expression. Craftspeople found affirmation…
The opening of any major new American museum is news, especially when the museum has been designed by world-renowned architect, Moshe Safdie. But the opening of that museum in the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks sends reverberations through the art…
Few moments in American cultural history are as recognizable as the 1920s—their mere mention conjures flappers, Fords, and skyscraper cities. And yet, American artists responded to their dizzying modern world with art that evoked stillness, clarity, and order. With Youth…
Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar (1465–1524) of Spain led the first expedition to colonize Cuba in 1511, founding Cuba’s first seven towns: Baracoa (1512), Bayamo (1513), Santiago de Cuba (1514), Sancti Spiritus (1514), Trinidad (1514), Santa Maria del Puerto del Principe…
Although most fraktur were made in southeastern Pennsylvania, where a large number of German-speaking immigrants had settled, the tradition was carried into central and western Pennsylvania as well as the Shenandoah Valley, the Midwest, and even Ontario by later generations…
When the Bucks County landscape painters first came to national prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, landscape painting was one of the cutting edge, avant-garde styles of the day. Painters like Redfield, Garber, and Spencer built stellar…
The schooner yacht America has been the subject of more paintings than any other pleasure or commercial vessel, perhaps rivaled only by the frigate Constitution. In 1851, the year of her victorious race off Cowes, England, she was portrayed by…
Concord, Massachusetts, has a lot of history for a small town. Founded in 1635 as the first inland settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Concord had a population of about fifteen hundred through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Concord…
As both the official residence and the working office of the president of the United States, the White House and its furnishings have invited great interest and comment since President John Adams became the first resident in November 1800. This…
How do you build upon one of the great collections of American art? And how can such familiar art appear transformed and enlivened? That was the challenge undertaken this summer by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where…
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