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List of illustrations

  • The Seed of Ambition
  • William Merritt Chase
  • Bonds of Sympathy
  • William Merritt Chase
  • A Voice He Didn't Understand
  • Artistic Type
  • Scientific Type
  • A Modern Meeting of the Salmagundi Club
  • A Corner of the Studio
  • Portrait of William Walton
  • Self-Portrait
  • Wordsworth Thompson
  • Portrait of Jasper Francis Cropsey
  • The Giant's Robe
  • Reminiscences of the Academy, Where the Frames Are So Much Better Than the Pictures
  • Valuable Presents from Gentlemen
  • The Studio of J. G. Brown
  • Studio of Mr. W. M. Chase
  • Studio of Mr. Humphrey Moore
  • Interior Decoration
  • Art Goods
  • In the Studio
  • Still Life with Fish
  • The Recitation
  • Nocturne in Blue and Silver
  • Group photograph in Robert Henri's studio, 1717 Chestnut St., Philadelphia
  • Saharet
  • Caritas
  • The "Girl in the Pie" at the Three-Thousand Five Hundred Dollar Dinner in Artist Breese's New York Studio
  • An Infelicitous Question
  • An Aesthetic Midday Meal
  • Maudle on the Choice of a Profession
  • Nincompoopiana—The Mutual Admiration Society
  • Oscar Wilde
  • How Far Is It from This to This?
  • What the Child Has Grown To
  • Anglo
  • In New York
  • The Triumph of Genius
  • At Mrs. Daubleigh Crome's
  • In a Twentieth-Century Club
  • In the Shade of a Tree (Sunlight, Connecticut)
  • George Inness
  • The Riverbank, Lambertville, New Jersey
  • Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket
  • Church at Old Lyme, Connecticut
  • River Rats
  • Untitled (Nocturnal Landscape with Adobe Building)
  • Near the Beach, Shinnecock
  • Now I can see what they is to it, son—jus' as plain!
  • Sunset
  • Portrait of General James Watson Webb
  • The Results of "High Speed" on Man and Machine
  • The Entrance to the Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish
  • Eventide
  • The Piano
  • Curfew Hour
  • Twilight: Early Spring
  • Sunset in the Old Orchard, Montclair
  • Weatherbeaten
  • May
  • Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate
  • Mr. Gregory's Studio
  • A Corner of Miss Welch's Studio
  • Mr. Eliot Gregory
  • The Future of the Artist's Necktie
  • Cosy Corner
  • Spring Time: Early Spring in New England
  • Clearing Off
  • Mrs. Larz Anderson
  • Mrs. George Swinton
  • Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel
  • Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children
  • Ernesta (Child with Nurse)
  • The Female Artist Who Has Ceased To Be Feminine
  • Harriet Hosmer at work on statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton
  • Passport photograph of Cecilia Beaux
  • Portrait of Winslow Homer in New York
  • Eastern Point
  • Lost on the Grand Banks
  • Undertow
  • The Iron Jaws That Smashed Pacific Mail
  • Winter Coast
  • The Two Guides
  • End of the Portage
  • Canoe in Rapids
  • The Blue Boat
  • Huntsman and Dogs
  • James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  • James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  • James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  • The Two Apprentices
  • James McNeill Whistler
  • James McNeill Whistler
  • The Man Whistler at the Telephone
  • John La Farge
  • Napoleon Sarony
  • F. Hopkinson Smith
  • F. Hopkinson Smith
  • The Salmagundi Club in Early Times
  • 'Av You Seen My Fahzer's Ole Shoes?
  • All As It Used To Be
  • Three Musketeers of the Brush
  • Albert Pinkham Ryder
  • I wonder why Dabble . . .
  • A Surprise
  • The Studio of W. M. Chase
  • Like the Wrong Man
  • Equal to the Occasion
  • At the Academy
  • How She Knew
  • Not an Expert
  • Impertinently Pertinent
  • A Discerning Friend
  • Charles Dana Gibson
  • Quantity Not Quality
  • The Point of View
  • How to Become a Post-Impressionist Paint Slinger
  • Breaking Home Ties
  • Bringing Home the Bride
  • Sewing—A Portrait
  • An Arrangement
  • One of the Finest Art Critics I Ever Met
  • She Overheard Two Art Students Discussing
  • In Arcadia
  • Hailing the Ferry
  • Salon 1888
  • Frederick Yohn
  • Breaking Home Ties
  • Mr. Low in His Studio in Paris, While Engaged on the Painting for the Waldorf Hotel Ceiling
Free
Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
Contents
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.001
Free
Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
Over the course of several years spent researching and writing this book, it has been my good fortune to have strong intellectual, moral, and practical support from many colleagues and friends. For their vital assistance in locating hard-to-find paintings and illustrations, I thank Lynn Corbett and Vicky A. Clark, The Carnegie Museum of Art; Catherine Gordon and Colum Hourihane, Witt Library; Susan Marcotte, Archives of American Art; Mary Holahan, Delaware Art Museum; Elizabeth Broun, National …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.002
Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
In 1900, American artists—as seen by contemporary critics—presented a vigorous, triumphantly self-assertive front at the Paris Universal Exposition. John Singer Sargent’s vivid portrait Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children (see fig. 73), occupying the center of one muted green wall in the American rooms, made an arresting impression as the “crack-a-jack picture of the show.” Symmetrically flanking Mrs. Meyer—the quintessence of fashion and artifice—were images of raw, ostensibly unmediated nature: …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-16
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.003

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
If we were to construct a composite image of the late-nineteenth-century American artist, this generically white, male, Anglo-Saxon figure would be highly individualistic, possessed of a powerful personality, spiritual, sensitive, close to nature, self-absorbed, reclusive, marginal, childlike and primitive, yet simultaneously materialistic, sociable and socially adept, gentlemanly, civic-minded, worldly, urbane, businesslike, and fully integrated into every aspect of modern life. As individuals, …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.19-45
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.004

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
In 1905, B. O. Flower, editor of the liberal magazine Arena, described the great crisis of contemporary art as a battle “between those who stand for sane and normal freedom and who though true to the basic principles of art refuse to be copyists or imitators,” and “those . . . imbued with the soul-stagnating spirit of modern commercialism” who are intent on forming a trust “where the measuring-rod of mediocrity would become paramount.” Pitting incorporated modes of artistic practice against the …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.46-76
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.005

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
The taint of trade represented only one among a family of strains powerful enough to corrupt American art and culture in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Aestheticism, or art for art’s sake, was equally virulent, and so dangerous that it incited an all-out campaign against any art, in any medium, that rejected the conventions of morality, legibility, and imitation of nature while worshipping at the shrine of incandescent, sensuous beauty. However ravishing, such beauty was really only …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.79-119
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.006

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
The campaign to neutralize and Americanize aestheticism extended beyond prescriptions for wholesomeness and manly discipline in art. Those seeking normalization also undertook to restructure the very concept of artistic vision. At the core of this enterprise was the remodeling of “morbid” egotism into healthy and specialized subjectivity. This newly legitimized subjectivity in turn helped create a dynamic role for art as a form of therapy couched in a purely visual language, acting directly on …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.120-156
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.007

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
In her study of women’s cultural activities from 1830 to 1930, Kathleen D. McCarthy contends that artists of the Gilded Age seemed “almost anxious” to conform to the public’s “preconceived views” about them and that the comportment of such painters as Chase, La Farge, and Whistler “helped to feed public mistrust of what were viewed as the essentially feminine and passive leanings of the artistic community.” Yet at the same time, “men managed to retain their professional supremacy in the field” …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.159-186
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.008

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
Even though American artists had with considerable success colonized the feminine and naturalized aestheticism, some critics found much of contemporary art weak and inadequate to the spirit of modern America. As a Harper’s editorial put it, “It is a period of refinement and decoration, in which the how is more important than the what. ... It is a day of little masters, of the art that seeks effect but feels nothing, of small and exquisite things ... of the dainty representation of our own small …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.188-217
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.009

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
In the late nineteenth century, writers exhibited a marked tendency to dwell on the personal traits and appearance of artists. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the voluminous archive dedicated to the expatriate American James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the subject of scores of articles, a number that would rise to many hundreds (along with a large number of books) in the decades after his death. Both generator and focus of a vigorous publicity enterprise, Whistler—or at least certain …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.221-246
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.010

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
The construction of bohemia in late nineteenth-century America involved fabricating a stage or an arena for its display. This arena was the media, which industriously circulated colorful pictures of bohemian artist life as the performance of youthful dreams, picturesque poverty, good fellowship, high spirits, and high ideals. The underlying assumption was almost always that such an existence was and must be ephemeral; it was a stage of life—a kind of adolescence—that gave way in time to maturity …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.247-273
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.011

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
On the cover of the July 28, 1892, issue, Life featured an elaborately detailed cartoon (fig. 105) of a social gathering in a studio outfitted with tapestries, portieres, antique chests, old books, crammed portfolios, and bric-à-brac. In the foreground, an attractive young woman and a clean-shaven, broad-shouldered young man examine some prints or drawings. To the rear, the resident artist shows off a painting on his easel to a flock of admiring ladies, one of whom gazes at him, rather than the …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.277-299
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.012

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Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
In 1962, critic John Canaday reviewed an exhibition of nineteenth-century American genre paintings selected to highlight the “almost forgotten” name of Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895). Canaday focused on Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties (fig. 119), noting that when the painting was on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, “people lined up for blocks to see it, and wore out several replacements of the carpet in front of [it] as they stood admiring it.” It was unlikely that anyone would …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.300-327
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.013

Access to this content is only available to subscribers. If you are at an institution that currently subscribes to the A&AePortal, please login to your VPN before accessing the site. If you have already purchased an individual subscription, please sign in to your account to access the content. Learn more about subscriptions.

Free
Description: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
Index
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.014
Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
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