Until 1/24/10 American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, NYC
(Please note that you may enter the Museum at Fifth Avenue and 81st street or at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street.)
(212) 535-7710
Cost: museum admission is pay-what-you-wish
For all ages

There are only a few days left to catch this exhibit at the Met. Following are a few highlights of the collection. For a preview or if you cannot make it to the museum, you can check out many more paintings and the interesting stories behind them at:

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/americanstories/overview.aspx?

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.

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William Merritt Chase (American, 1849–1916)

The Lake for Miniature Yachts, ca. 1888

Oil on canvas; 16 x 24 in. (40.6 x 61 cm)
The Terian Collection of American Art

The American Impressionists captured the energy and fragmentation of contemporary experience in Paris, Boston, New York, and other cities, often focusing on public parks, which allowed them to portray urban life without confronting urban hardship. Although he usually stressed pastoral charm in his park paintings, Chase allowed the pavement to dominate this view of the Conservatory Water, a small pond just inside the Fifth Avenue boundary of New York's Central Park, at Seventy-third Street. He shows Fifth Avenue's rooftops invading the insulating screen of trees that surrounds the park, thus signaling growing challenges to the park's rural fiction. A boy in a fashionable sailor suit striding along at left and an older boy and a well-dressed younger girl at the pond's edge appear as if glimpsed in an instant, quietly pursuing their own interests without any concern for the viewer or for enacting an apparent narrative.

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John George Brown (American, 1831–1913)

The Card Trick, 1880–89
Oil on canvas mounted on panel; 26 x 31 in. (66 x 78.7 cm)
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, Gift of the Estate of Sarah Joslyn (JAM1944.14)

Brown's narratives maintain the explicitness of mid-nineteenth-century works, though he painted many of them much later. In this canvas, three white bootblacks watch a black youth perform a card trick. Brown ascribes street smarts and gamesman's skills to this clever character. One of the few American painters before 1900 to grapple with the subject of the urban poor, Brown specialized in sentimental depictions of industrious immigrants, especially street urchins who project optimism and good cheer despite the hardships of city life. These ragamuffins—counterparts of Horatio Alger's homeless fourteen-year-old bootblack Ragged Dick and other resourceful characters—flourished and inspired Brown until compulsory public education laws ended their enterprise.

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Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926)

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878
Oil on canvas; 35 1/2 x 51 1/8 in. (89.5 x 129.8 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (1983.1.18)
Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Inspired by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other members of their circle, Cassatt embraced the Impressionists' commitment to forthright storytelling about inconsequential subjects. In a room crammed with haphazardly arranged furniture, the daughter of friends of Degas sprawls on an overstuffed chair while Cassatt's Brussels griffon rests on another. Although Cassatt's candid picture of a bored or exhausted child repudiates traditional portraits of charming little girls in proper poses holding faithful dogs, she was enraged when the American jury rejected it for display at the 1878 Exposition Universelle. Instead, she showed it with the Impressionists in 1879, the first of her four exhibitions with the group.


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John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)

The Sketchers, ca. 1913
Oil on canvas; 22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, The Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund (58.11)
Photograph: Wen Hwa Ts'ao. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

This quintessential Impressionist studio scene is believed to portray Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn and his wife, Jane—or possibly their friend Mary Foote—working outdoors in September 1913 near Lake Garda in San Vigilio, Italy, where they had joined Sargent's entourage. Detached from the claims of mundane existence, they are absorbed in painting from nature. The Sketchers describes a genteel existence that would be forever altered by the social and political changes wrought by World War I. In Sargent's account of sunlit San Vigilio, there is no premonition of the guns of August 1914 at Sarajevo and no acknowledgment of the radical changes in art that were already challenging the practice of painting American stories. Created thirty-five years after Sargent first embraced Impressionism, The Sketchers demonstrates the durability of nineteenth-century styles and narrative devices.