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Displaying items by tag: the jolly flatboatmen

In its pre-Instagram, pretelevision, all-but-pre-photography day, George Caleb Bingham’s “The Jolly Flatboatmen” (1846) was a viral image, a joyous genre painting of America’s westward expansion that became wildly popular through mezzotints and lithographs. The work itself, considered one of the most important American paintings of its kind, has hung in the National Gallery of Art in Washington for so many decades — regularly since 1956 — that it long ago came to seem like a part of the museum’s fabric.

Published in News
Tuesday, 13 November 2012 18:54

Four Major Museums Including the Louvre Team Up

For the second time in two years, Paris' musee du Louvre, Atlanta's High Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkanas' Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Chicago's Terra Foundation will join forces to promote American art history education. The collaboration, which launched last year, was conceived in 2007 after the High's exhibition Louvre Atlanta, the product of a collection-sharing agreement with the French institution.

This installation of the four-year collaboration will focus on American genre painting of the 19th century, specifically how artists associated with the movement depicted day-to-day life at a time when America was still coming into its own. The exhibition, titled American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, will open at the Louvre on January 17, 2013 and travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum in May and then to the High Museum in September. Featured paintings include Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate's The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix (1856) from Crystal Bridges, Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (circa 1870) from the High Museum, and George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1877-78) from the Terra Foundation. The Louvre's contributions, a painting by the Dutch artist Jan Steen and one by Englishman William Mulready, will explore the European influence on American genre painting.

Last year's inaugural exhibition focused on American landscape painting and featured works by Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole. It is currently wrapping up its run at the High Museum ending January 6, 2013.

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