Artists In Ohio 1787 1900

A three-volume guide to the early art and artists of Ohio. It includes coverage of fine art, photography, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery.

This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism’s erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt’s profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.

Between 1802, when the young Kentucky artist William Edward West began to paint portraits while on a downriver journey, and 1920, when the last of Frank Duveneck's students worked in Louisville, a large number of notable portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. In Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920, Estill Curtis Pennington charts the course of those artists as they painted a variety of sitters drawn from both urban and rural society. The work is illustrated, when possible, from The Filson Historical Society collection of some four hundred portraits representing one of the most extensive holdings available for study in the region. Portraiture involves artists and subjects, known as sitters, and is an art that combines elements of biography, aesthetics, and cultural history. Private portraits often attract an oral history that enlivens the more colorful aspects of local tradition and culture. Public portraits of towering figures such as George Washington, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln were often reproduced in printed format to satisfy popular demand and subsequently attained an iconic, timeless status. Lessons in Likeness is organized in two parts. Part One, the cultural chronology, serves as a backdrop to the biographies of the portrait artists. This section identifies stylistic sources and significant historical moments that influenced the artists and their milieus. Rather than working in isolation, portrait artists were connected to the world around them and influenced by prevailing trends in their trade. Early in the nineteenth century, for instance, Matthew Jouett journeyed to Boston for study with Gilbert Stuart, and upon his return to Kentucky painted in a style that subsequently influenced an entire generation. Later artists, notably Oliver Frazer and William Edward West, studied the lessons of Thomas Sully in Philadelphia. Sully popularized the lush, warmly colored, and highly flattering style of portraiture practiced by many of the itinerant artists whose careers were facilitated by the introduction of steam and rail travel. The Civil War provoked a dramatic shift in the cultural terrain, further augmented by the rise of photography and the emergence of academic art centers. Painters who had previously worked with a master painter, or learned on their own, were now able to study at established schools, especially in Cincinnati, which became one of the leading centers for the teaching of art in late nineteenth-century America. Several of the teachers there, Frank Duveneck and Thomas Satterwhite Noble in particular, had firsthand experience with avant-garde European styles, notably the realism and naturalism practiced in Munich and Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then taught in the art schools of New York and Philadelphia. Part Two profiles the artists from this area and period who have appeared in previous art historical literature and have an identifiable body of work represented in public and private collections. Individual biographies provide details of the artists' lives, sources for further study, and locations of works in public collections.

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872-1937) is best known for herfloral woodblock prints that range from delicate Japanese-inspiredstylizations to boldly colored and progressivelymodernist works. In her brief twenty-year career, Hopkins producedseventy-four known woodblock prints, including figurativework and landscapes as well as floral compositions. This catalogueraisonné is the first in-depth study of this once well-known Americanartist. It illustrates all of Hopkins's known prints, related drawings, andstudies. Born in Hudson, Michigan, Hopkins attended the Art Academy of Cincinnatifrom 1895 to 1898. In 1899 she took classes with the influential artist ArthurWesley Dow, an advocate of Japanese art. Following her marriage in 1904, Hopkinsand her husband settled in Paris, where they remained until the outbreakof World War I. After returning to America, Hopkins became part of a smallgroup of artists in Provincetown, whose innovations in woodblock printmakinghave come to be known as the Provincetown print or the white line woodcut. In1917, a visit to the Cumberland Falls region of Kentucky provided the inspirationfor some of Hopkins's most important prints which predate the work ofAmerican regionalist painters and printmakers by a decade or more. In addition to the catalogue raisonné, Edna Boies Hopkins includes much new biographical research along with a census of her prints and a comprehensive list of her exhibitions. Exhibition Dates Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, December 14, 2007-March 2, 2008 Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH, March 15-June 1, 2008 Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA, June 1-Aug. 3, 2008 Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 20, 2010-May 2, 2010

Examines regional culture through the contributions of visual arts and includes a DVD Arising out of the Cleveland Artists Foundation's Dialogue Series, a 22-hour-long collection of forums held in cultural institutions and broadcast on National Public Radio, Creative Essence examines regional culture through an exploration of the distinguished contributions Cleveland has made to the visual arts and architecture. The Dialogue Series brought together a variety of people in the visual arts community to discuss the development of the region's creative life and environment, whether it be through architecture and city planning or through the industrial and fine arts. They shared their views and knowledge about how regionalism has long influenced artistic productivity. Their exchanges and ideas for the future are provocative and thoughtful. Richly illustrated with the work of well-known Cleveland-area artists and architects, past and present, Creative Essence explores the region's tradition, beginning with the "Cleveland School" of artists that was active and influential during the first half of the twentieth century. It moves on to examine the changes that occurred in the last half of the century and the development of the visual arts in northeast Ohio. Creative Essence is an important resource for understanding the significant role the visual arts play in our cities and societies and how they contribute to the region's quality of life. For those interested in regional history and for students of art history and the visual arts, this will be especially valuable.

The bicentennial edition of this publication has been revised and updated and includes an additional chapter which examines Ohio through to the end of the 20th century. George W. Knepper presents contemporary information on the national and state political arenas, the economy and the environment.

A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend. In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.