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History of American Painting #2
History of American Painting, Vol. 2: The Light of Distant Skies, 1760-1835
Most of the major painters in the two generations covered in this history spent time in Europe and attempted to link their native convictions with the European tradition. While the painters of the revolutionary generation succeeded and became leaders in the evolution of European styles, the first painters of the new republic were artistically stifled by their attempts to base a native American tradition on European models.
James Thomas Flexner unfolds this history with the ease of a historical novel. The individual characters and styles of each painter are carefully delineated: Benjamin West who became president of England's Royal Academy; the versatile and irrepressible Charles Willson Peale; the brooding Trumbull; the eccentric arch-Romantic Washington Allston; Morse, who in despair abandoned painting to invent the telegraph; the confident tailor-dyer-painter Francis Guy; and many others. Flexner also tells of the painters, from semi-sophisticate to "primitive" who did not go to Europe—Audubon, Hicks, and others.
Written with grace, sympathy, and erudition, this is a valuable contribution to the study of the roots of American consciousness; it is in fact a history of the search of for a national spirit in America. It is as useful and enjoyable a historical and philosophical guide as it is a valuable contribution to the history of American art.
James Thomas Flexner unfolds this history with the ease of a historical novel. The individual characters and styles of each painter are carefully delineated: Benjamin West who became president of England's Royal Academy; the versatile and irrepressible Charles Willson Peale; the brooding Trumbull; the eccentric arch-Romantic Washington Allston; Morse, who in despair abandoned painting to invent the telegraph; the confident tailor-dyer-painter Francis Guy; and many others. Flexner also tells of the painters, from semi-sophisticate to "primitive" who did not go to Europe—Audubon, Hicks, and others.
Written with grace, sympathy, and erudition, this is a valuable contribution to the study of the roots of American consciousness; it is in fact a history of the search of for a national spirit in America. It is as useful and enjoyable a historical and philosophical guide as it is a valuable contribution to the history of American art.
307 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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About the author
James Thomas Flexner
77 books27 followersJames Thomas Flexner was an American historian and biographer best known for the four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award in Biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. A cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Flexner worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune from 1929 until 1931, after which he worked as an executive secretary for the New York City Department of Health before leaving the job the following year in order to devote his full energies to writing.
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