American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life

Metropolitan Museum of of Art
New York, New York

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

"Between the American Revolution and World War I, a group of British colonies became states, the frontier pushed westward to span the continent, a rural and agricultural society became urban and industrial, and the United States—reunified after the Civil War under an increasingly powerful federal government—emerged as a leading participant in world affairs. Throughout this complicated, transformative period, artists recorded American life as it changed around them. Many of the nation's most celebrated painters—John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows—along with their lesser-known colleagues captured the temperament of their respective eras, defining the character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities.

"American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915" presents tales artists told about their times and examines how their accounts reflect shifting professional standards, opportunities for study, foreign prototypes, venues for display, and viewers' expectations. Excluding images based on history, myth, or literature, the exhibition emphasizes instead those derived from artists' firsthand observation, documentation, and interaction with clients. These paintings are analogous to original—not adapted—screenplays. Recurring themes such as childhood, marriage, family, and community; the notion of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art illuminate the evolution of American artists' approach to narrative."

Through January 24, 2010

[Text and graphic from museum website. Caption: "Thomas Anshutz (American, 1851–1912). "The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880." Oil on canvas; 17 x 23 7/8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd.

During one of his annual trips to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he had spent his teens, Anshutz sketched workers taking a break in the yard of a nail factory, the sort of dreary industrial setting from which most painters averted their eyes. He then painted the men frozen in classical poses derived from life-drawing instruction, which he had received as Thomas Eakins's student at the Pennsylvania Academy. The painting's subtle narrative has invited multiple interpretations. For example, in 1884 Procter & Gamble quoted the image in an advertisement for Ivory Soap by adding washtubs to the foreground. Other commentators have read in it a message of labor's toll upon the men or a celebration of relations between workers and employers. Recent scholars have considered it a nostalgic account of skilled laborers in the face of impersonal factory production and an emblem of rugged masculinity in the face of feminized late-nineteenth-century American culture." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]