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Paintings
American colonial elites surrounded themselves with paintings, furniture, and other objects to shape their identities and to set themselves apart from others.
‘The ingenious Captain Peale” sired a dynasty of painters and started America’s first great museum.
David Fertig wonderfully captures a bygone age of naval warfare.
During the age of fighting sail, artists painted ships and seamen in highly realistic fashion, and most such paintings date from their own day. That was a long era, but square-rigged wooden-hulled warships were a stable technology, and taste in depicting them was stable, too.
In painting the romance of the American cowboy, Remington knew instinctively what would grip his audience and held it fast.
In the summer of 1885 a young artist from New York by way of Kansas City found himself resting by a campfire with a couple of prospectors out in Arizona Territory at a time when Geronimo was on the prowl, perhaps “even in our neighborhood.” It was about 9 o’c
“An unconquerable mind in a frame of iron”
Forgotten paintings by George Catlin, who saw the West unspoiled, turn up again to recall the marvels that unfolded before the eyes of the heroic French explorer
The Middle West has put its stamp on many artists’ work
It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open prairies were like the sea itself, rolling west in an unbroken treeless groundswell.
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