1990s American Art National Gallery of Art, Washington 30 Postcards Book

Details

Description

American Art National Gallery of Art, Washington 30 postcards book
• 1990 National Gallery of Art, Washington
AMERICAN ART
Among … Read more American Art National Gallery of Art, Washington 30 postcards book
• 1990 National Gallery of Art, Washington
AMERICAN ART
Among American artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was both an awareness of European roots and artistic traditions, and a supreme consciousness of America's seemingly limitless possibilities and her unique, emerging place in the world.
Beginning in the colonial period and continuing in the new republic, our painters at first sought to create images that would reproduce the elegance and formal complexity of British examples. Some, like John Singleton Copley, who emigrated from Boston to England in 1774, achieved great success as both portraitists and history painters.
Copley's Watson and the Shark, which illustrates an episode in the youth of Brook Watson, a man who later became Lord Mayor of London, was just one of the expatriate's many successes. Gilbert Stuart studied in London and painted in England and Ireland as well as in the United States. He achieved renown, however, as the maker of insightful images of young America's distinguished citizens. The most prominent of these was, of course, George Washington, whom Stuart painted from life in 1795.
Rembrandt Peale's Rubens Peale with a Geranium, of 1801, harks back to the eighteenth-century tradition of portraiture. At the same time, with its more relaxed depiction of the sitter and its attention to botanical elements, it predicts the nineteenth-century American interest in genre and landscape subjects. Some of these landscapes had an obvious moral or religious content. Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and Jasper Cropsey's Spirit of War use natural settings as backdrops for the stories they tell…..
4 3/4” H x 6 5/8” W x 1/2” D See less