This volume features nearly 500 paintings, watercolors, pastels, and miniatures from Harvard University's storied, yet little-known, collection of American art. These works, many unpublished, are drawn from the Harvard Art Museums, the University Portrait Collection, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and other entities, and date from the early colonial years to the mid-19th century. Highlights include a rare group of 17th-century portraits, along with important paintings by Robert Feke, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston, in addition to works depicting western and Native American subjects by Alexandre de Batz, Henry Inman, and Alfred Jacob Miller, among others. Each work is accompanied by scholarly commentary that draws on extensive new research, as well as a complete exhibition and reference history. An introduction by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. describes the history of the collection. Lavishly illustrated in color, this compendium is a testament to the nation's oldest collection of American art, and an essential resource for scholars and collectors alike.
Early in his career, critics and collectors widely recognized that Harold Weston (1894-1972), was capturing and saying something unusual in his paintings. "There is a young American painter," wrote Duncan Phillips, "who stirs in me the hope for a re-birth on this new soil of something that was not lost to the art of painting with the passing of Vincent van Gogh." Along with 104 color and ten black-and-white plates of Weston's works, the catalog includes essays that cover myriad aspects of Weston's life and art. The Adirondack Museum's chief curator Caroline M. Welsh explores nature and wilderness preservation as themes in twentieth-century art and places Weston in the context of his contemporaries who painted the Adirondacks. The biographical essay by the exhibition's guest curator Rebecca Foster follows the unfolding of a career in parallel to the unfolding of a life. Weston's rich technique is explored by Stephen Bennett-Phillips, curator at the Phillips Collection, in an analysis of the painting. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., curator of American art at the Fogg Art Museum, provides an introduction to the catalogue.
American Artists have been inspired by Italy since the 1760s, when Benjamin West, the first American painter to travel there, was drawn to the ancient Roman ruins and magnificent Renaissance architecture, statuary, and frescoes. This intriguing, superbly illustrated book is the first to explore the fascination Italy held for the American artist from West's time to the eve of World War I. The unique sense of the past found in Italy, where tangible evidence exists of a continual civilization from antiquity to the present, lured countless American artists to its cities, towns, and countryside. Painters from West and Copley in the eighteenth century to Cole, Inness, Whistler, Sargent, and Prendergast in the nineteenth century were inspired to create many of their finest works in Italy, as were American sculptors such as Hiram Powers and Harriet Hosmer and writers from Washington Irving to Henry James. This in-depth study includes 319 illustrations, of which 113 are reproduced in full color, many of works that have not previously been published. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., John Moors Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Professor of Art History at Boston University, provides a broad overview of the American perception of Italy and the unique role that Italy played in the formation of American art. Further insights into this new area in the study and appreciation of American art are offered in four essays by such leading art historians as William H. Gerdts, City University of New York; Erica E. Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fred S. Licht, Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, and Boston University; and William L. Vance, Boston University. Individual commentaries on each of the paintings, sculpture, and watercolors have been written by the curatorial staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lure of Italy accompanies a major exhibition of the same name, organized by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Erica E. Hirshler that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Martin Johnson Heade was one of the most significant American painters of the nineteenth century, creator of portraits, history and genre pictures, still lifes, ornithological studies, landscapes, and marines, and his own unique orchid and hummingbird compositions. This book brings a perspective to Heade and his works, presenting him as one of the most original and productive painters of his time. Theodore Stebbins builds on his acclaimed 1975 study of Heade, drawing on several newly discovered collections of Heade's letters and the painter's own Brazilian journal. Stebbins tells of Heade's training and early career as an itinerant portraitist and discusses his move to New York, where, under the influence of Frederic E. Church, he began painting landscapes and seascapes. He examines Heade's relationships with patrons and dealers, writers and scientists, and he sheds new light on Heade’s trips to Brazil, to the Central American tropics, and to London. And he describes Heade's move to Florida in 1883, which marked not his retirement but a final period of creativity that lasted until his death in 1904. The book includes not only an examination of Heade's life and works but also reproductions of all his 620 known paintings, including nearly 250 that have been discovered since 1975.
This volume features nearly 500 paintings, watercolors, pastels, and miniatures from Harvard University's storied, yet little-known, collection of American art. These works, many unpublished, are drawn from the Harvard Art Museums, the University Portrait Collection, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and other entities, and date from the early colonial years to the mid-19th century. Highlights include a rare group of 17th-century portraits, along with important paintings by Robert Feke, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston, in addition to works depicting western and Native American subjects by Alexandre de Batz, Henry Inman, and Alfred Jacob Miller, among others. Each work is accompanied by scholarly commentary that draws on extensive new research, as well as a complete exhibition and reference history. An introduction by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. describes the history of the collection. Lavishly illustrated in color, this compendium is a testament to the nation's oldest collection of American art, and an essential resource for scholars and collectors alike.
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