The Artist in His Museum

ABOUT THE same time that Eakins began his portrait of Dr. Gross, he made preliminary sketches for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River...

Human beings are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of ideas and practices. This volume explores the competing understandings of the human being that have figured in the history of American art. Its seven essays consider a range of artworks from the early modern period to the present in order to...

~SAMUEL F. B. MORSE was not the first artist to paint a picture of a celebrated art collection, nor was he the first to edit or embellish the collection...

Histories of the United States often begin with an evocation of the “first” contact made by European explorers with the territories that would become the American nation, but this is at best an imprecise and misleading enterprise. Was it the Norsemen who are thought to have visited New England as early as the eleventh century, or the Spanish military and religious men who first...

~GEOLOGY REIGNED through much of the nineteenth century as America’s most “fashionable” science. Between 1820 and 1870, men and women across the country avidly pursued an interest in the field. They pushed their way into crowded lecture halls to hear talks by prominent geologists; they bought geological textbooks, and they scoured the...

~The Agnew Clinic (fig. 1) today hangs high on a wall in the foyer of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. The painting cannot be taken in all at once; approximately six feet high by eleven feet long, it is exceptionally large. What first attracts the eye is the white-clad figure standing in isolation in the foreground, left...

In the fall of 1773, James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson embarked on a tour to the Hebrides in Scotland. On their way they spent two days at Armadale on the Isle of Skye, waiting for a favorable wind for their vessel to carry them northward. While at Armadale, Boswell wrote:

The regionalist artists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood did not belong to the American Artists’ Congress, nor did they participate in the numerous artistic and political activities organized on behalf of Spain during the Popular Front. These artists resided in the Midwest, removed from the leftist political fervor concentrated in New York City; they appeared far more concerned with developing an indigenous American art than with addressing international political events. …

Sometime between 1883 and 1885, a colleague photographed Thomas Eakins unclothed and holding aloft a naked female student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (fig. 1). In recent decades, this image has been tendered as the most tangible proof of the artist’s indiscretions. Although the scene undoubtedly is worthy of critique, it also is worth noting that Eakins hardly was the first indiscreet Philadelphian. More than a century before that shutter snapped, Charles Willson Peale sketched …