Art History Midterm 1

An artistic style that portrays the subject matter in a simplified or stylized manner

Abstraction

Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O'Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, PA, 1863. Book: No wonder then that what is perhaps the most famous photograph of the Civil War, Timothy O'Sullivan's (c. 1840-82) A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863, counters its vision of decay and anonymity with a hint of mystery (fig. 8.36). The photograph's propensity for realism dissolves as the eye travels from foreground to background. The ghostly figures in the distant haze appear like versions of the Grim Reaper. The very title of O'Sullivan's photograph, A Harvest of Death, adds an almost biblical dimension to the scene. The photograph seems to implore its viewer to step imaginatively over the wall of bodies in the foreground. What follows is a recession into deep space. The farther we travel toward the horizon, the more the battlefield and bodies seem to dematerialize. O'Sullivan's photograph leaves open the question of whether the light in the background represents hope or emptiness

Daguerrotype

An artistic technique used to capture an image from life, an early predecessor of the photograph

Daguerrotype

Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893

Daguerrotype:

An artistic subject matter used to portray Christ's descent from the Cross and/or the placement of his body in a tomb

Deposition

Artistic techniques using metal plates to make multiple print copies of an image

Engraving/Etching

A European movement of the 17th-18th century usually associated with liberty, progress, reason, and equality

Enlightenment

An artistic subject matter consisting of a scene from everyday life

Genre Painting

Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848; Book: attracted notice because of its lively depiction of the home front at a time of national crisis. It portrays a sampling of the electorate gobbling up the latest news from a daily paper, which dominates the composition and serves as its focal point. Radiating outward from the newspaper are eleven figures and the bottom half of an eagle, all gathered under or beside the portico of a combined tavern, inn, and post office identified, with heavy-handed significance, as the 'J\merican Hotel" (hence the eagle). With wide eyes, gaping mouth, and exaggerated body language, the man at center stage reads aloud from the newspaper clutched in his fists.It reports on the latest happenings in the Mexican War (1846-8), which cost the lives of thousands of soldiers on both sides and resulted in the addition to the United States of 500,000 square miles of conquered territory in the West. The supporting players mug and gesticulate their reactions: one figure, in the shadowy background, throws up his hand; another grasps the frame of his eyeglasses; a third raps his knuckles against one of the portico's pilasters; a fourth, who relays the news to an old gentle- man with hearing difficulties, points a thumb emphatically toward the newspaper. Despite the obviousness of these gestures, it's not altogether evident whether the news is good or bad for the denizens of the American Hotel. Clearly, though, they're all personally involved in what they are hearing, and that includes the humble black man and his little girl in rags; the outcome of the war had a direct bearing on how far west Congress would permit slavery to extend. Those opposed to slavery also opposed the war. The black family is situated at the periphery: they are not part of the consensus and although they have a personal stake in the war, they have no democratic say in it. A white woman, squeezed to the side of the canvas and visible in the window, is similarly characterized as marginal to the sphere of public discourse, which Woodville shows to be populated exclusively by adult white men. Yet she, unlike the two African Americans, occupies a place securely within, rather than outside, the national hotel. In Woodville's day, the elderly gentleman in old- fashioned knee breeches would have been understood as a member of the Revolutionary-era generation. His presence in· the scene lends legitimacy to the current military conflict, suggesting that the war that started in 1846 embodied the ideals behind the war declared in 1776. But to the extent that the old man wears a grim or confused expression, the painting implies that '46 is not indisputably the moral successor to '76, and that the values of the present do not necessarily accord with those of the past.

Genre Painting

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Book: In 1893 Tanner painted this work (fig. 9.12) while in Philadelphia, to which he had returned from Paris to recover from typhoid fever. The Banjo Lesson was one of two genre paintings Tanner produced at this time in which poor southern blacks, still scarred by slavery, are presented with unsentimental dignity. The reserve of Tanner's subjects departs from the traditional image of the gregarious black performer. The Banjo Lesson was painted three years before the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), during a period when whites were committing lynchings and other crimes of intimidation to reestablish racial separation in the South. In this quiet scene a young boy is cradled in the arms of an older black man who holds up the neck of the banjo- an instrument too large for the boy to support. The boy tentatively strums the banjo with his awkwardly cocked right hand, while his left hand struggles with fingering. The two figures form a tight compositional and emotional unit, thoroughly absorbed in their world. They are situated in a simple, scrubbed domestic interior, the remains of a meal just eaten visible on the table in the background. An internal radiance sets off the massive dark brow and head of the man and illuminates the face of the young boy, a study in concentration. Knees spread wide, the man frames the boy in a metaphor of protection, tradition, and the bond furnished by music as it is passed from gen- eration to generation. Tanner may have drawn this subject on travels to North Carolina before returning to Paris. As the art historianJudith Wilson has pointed out, Tanner transforms the conventional view of blacks as innately musical by emphasizing the role of teaching in the trans- mission of black cultural forms.6 The young boy's face is illuminated from the left, in a traditional metaphor of enlightenment. In their embrace of vernacular subjects, these works by Tanner look forward to twentieth-century black artists who explored the place of tradition in black cultural identity. Traditions have a double-edged significance in African American communities, asserting continuity but also recalling a history of oppression. Tanner remained sensi- tive to this. In his work the banjo-associated with the min- strel tradition of grinning, extroverted blacks-becomes an instrument of generational exchange. Furthermore, as a New World adaptation with roots in Africa, the banjo harkens back to a preslavery past, and reconnects with ancestral traditions. Even so, Tanner explores black tradi- tion in a style of painting that is indistinguishable from that of white American artists who, like him, also studied in Paris in the later nineteenth century. Tanner's position between the worlds of American and French art, and between a supportive black family and white patrons, may, as Al Boime has suggested, have freed him from confining perspectives and allowed him to confront the experience of African Americans with new directness. Held up throughout his life as a representative of his race, Tanner himself resisted being labeled a "Negro" artist, insisting that race was irrelevant to his ambitions. And yet Tanner's social experience endowed him with uncommon sensitivity to the problems of black representation.

Genre painting

Art characterized by styles normally associated with two or more "separate" ethnic, cultural, or religious groups

Hybridity/Middle World

The use of specific (standard) visual signs to convey symbolic meaning

Iconography

Pictographic drawings made by Native Americans that portray their exploits or experiences in a miniaturized narrative form

Ledger Art

Black Hawk, Lakota Dream of Vision of Himself Changed to a Destroyer and Riding a Buffalo Eagle, 1880

Ledger Drawings

The idea that a United States stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific is pre-ordained by God, inevitable, and essential

Manifest Destiny

An artistic style that portrays the subject matter as it would appear in the world

Naturalism

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778 (shown at Royal Academy, London). Book: John Singleton Copley simi- larly punctuates a scene of disorder with the graceful figure of a black man. Copley achieved one of his first public successes after emigrating to London when he exhibited Watson and the Shark (1776) at the Royal Academy (fig. 4.38). The painting expands the conventions of history painting by focusing on a personal incident in the life of Copley's patron Brook Watson, rather than on a scene of public virtue and sacrifice. The large scale and serious tone of Watson and the Shark re-create the moment when Watson, then a young man, lost a leg to a shark while swimming in Havana harbor. If Greenwood composed Sea Captains in terms of an eighteenth-century theory of comedy, then Copley invoked a different aesthetic theory of the time- the sublime-when painting Watson. Most memorably outlined by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origi.n o f Our Ideas o f the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), this theory proposes that terror-from a safe aesthetic distance-can cause pleasure. Copley intends a visceral response to the shark-so huge and so close to both Watson and the viewer. The near-life-size rescuers in the boat dis- play the emotions that the situation provokes in the viewer. The nude body of Watson is based on an antique sculpture known as the Borghese Warrior, here locked in deadly combat with a savage force of nature. For an educated audience, Watson and the Shark offered two pleasures: a feeling of sublime horror at Watson's situation, and the pleasure of recognition at Copley's classical allusion. The art historian Albert Boime has interpreted Watson and the Shark as a political critique of the American Revolution. The painting draws attention to the hypocrisy of colonial claims to independence when such claims rest upon the continuance of slavery. The prominent position of the black man in the boat-one of only two figures standing-highlights the centrality of the slave trade to mercantile interests throughout the Atlantic. In an earlier sketch for Watson and the Shark, Copley had drawn a white sailor in the position that he later gave to the standing black man. Why Copley substituted the figure of the black man in the finished version is unclear. Brook Watson himself might have suggested the change, or might have described the scene to Copley as including a black man. What is important, however, is Copley's "editorial" control. He has placed the black man at the center of the triangle that visually organizes the figures in the boat. The man's outstretched right hand gestures to Watson in the waters below him. That gesture is repeated in reverse direction by Watson's own upward-reaching right hand. The painting thus binds together Watson and his black rescuer, a white body and a black man held together visually- and historically-by modes of interdependence that neither can avoid. When Copley's painting was first exhibited in London in 1778, viewers expressed skepticism at the efforts of the black man to save Watson. They noted the lax quality of the rope dangling from his hands and the failure of Watson to grasp it. The painting appeared to reinforce, rather than challenge, contemporary racial assumptions. It placed the black man behind a white figure in a position appropriate to a dedicated servant, and it left the black man's role in the ultimate rescue of Watson ambiguous. Nevertheless, Copley has not only integrated a black man prominently into the painting's central drama, but endowed him with psychological depth and profound humanity. Highlights upon the man's forehead and beneath his right eye suggest inwardness and contemplation. The painting's significance for us, then, lies in its com- bination of humanistic values and conservative politics. Copley opposes the secession of the British colonies. His criticism of demands for American independence hinges on a racial argument: that the people who proclaim their freedom are, hypocritically, the same people who maintain slavery. The more human Copley's black man appears to be, the more untenable the colonists' claims to freedom become. Copley thus produces an opening salvo in what will become a dissenting tradition of blacks being portrayed sympathetically by white artists. Watson and the Shark summarizes many of the social complications pervading colonial culture in the years lead- ing up to the American Revolution. The scene is located in Havana harbor, an outpost of the Spanish empire that functioned as a key stop in the slave trade of the eighteenth century. Ships left New England and the colonies for Africa. They traded rum for slaves, and then headed to Cuba and the West Indies, where they sold their African cargo for ·sugar and molasses, ingredients essential to the colonial economy. The painting thus draws together the transatlantic worlds of Europe and America in their mutual dependence upon enslaved labor from Africa. The painting also imagines its little world as a microcosm of the larger world: individuals from different classes (where differences in clothes denote differences in social rank) all work together under the direction of a single, upper middle-class man (the figure with the boat hook) in a hier- archy that sets white upper class over white working class, and both over black. And yet the painting does more than mark off the social and racial divisions of colonial society. By heroicizing its figures, and transforming an incident of commerce into a drama of salvation, the painter articulates a utopian vision of cooperation and interdependence that will take on new life in the following decade with the onset of the American Revolution.

Neoclassic

An artistic style that drew inspiration from the classical Greek/Roman traditions, based on symmetry and simplicity

Neoclassicism

The pseudo-science of measuring different parts of the human skull to indicate the intellectual capabilities of different ethnicities

Phrenology:

The pseudo-scientific belief that a person's facial features reflect their inner moral character

Physiognomy

Artist: Scipio Moorhead Phillis Wheatley, Frontispiece To her Poems, 1773. Notebook: was a writer, freed in england as the english were horrifeid that she was owned, From Senegal at age 7, named after owner. Portrait shows her in respectable dress and gesture of inspiration, of intellect

Portrait, engraving

John Quincy Adams Ward,The Freedman, 1863. Book: Another sculptor-John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910)-offered a strikingly different conception of the freed slave. Though done two years before Ball's, Ward's Freedman imagines the agent of emancipation to be the man himself. The Freedman eliminates the figure of Lincoln, focusing instead on the powerfully modeled slave. Entirely nude except for drapery across his loins, he still wears one manacle on his left wrist. His torso twists to the right, where his arm anchors the torque of his body in a pose that conveys coiled strength. His seated posture implies a further ambiguity-is he resting his weight upon the tree trunk that props his body up, or is he preparing to stand? The tension of his pose suggests an open-ended future no longer dictated by external forces but by the internal poise and dynamic power of the man himself. Like Ball's sculpture, The Freedman was originally intended as a monument (p. 280). But unlike the later work, The Freedman speaks a sculptural language that orig- inates in antiquity. The classical canon of proportion, the athleticism of idealized male form, and the graceful tor- sion of head and body, are all apparent in Ward's freedman. Unusually for this period, Ward uses a heroic model from antiquity-the Hellenistic Belvedere Torso, which linked physical perfection with moral grandeur-to represent a racial type that had been ordinarily associated with grotesque exaggeration and ungainly proportions. Conveying physi- cal power and individualized features, Ward's Freedman holds the promise of fuller human endowments and responsibilities. The Freedman reflects the uncertainties of the future. This black American frees himself through his own efforts. Yet he cannot act alone. A decade of federally enforced efforts to establish a new order of equality collapsed in 1877, foreclosing for the time being the unrealized promise of racial justice.

Sculpture

Thomas Ball, The Emancipation Group, 1873;Emancipation Memorial 1877 Washington DC. Book: Thomas Ball (1819-19n), an American sculptor from Boston, was inspired by the assassination of Lincoln to create his Emancipation Group of 1876 (fig. 9.4). Living in Florence at the time, Ball departed from the neoclassical and allegorical mode in favor of greater naturalism. Wearing contempo- rary dress, Ball's figure of Lincoln rests his unfurled Emancipation Proclamation upon a shield bearing the national coat of arms. His left arm is outstretched, confer- ring freedom on a crouching slave. The act of emancipation travels in one direction, from Lincoln to slave. Ball's sculpture expresses the hierarchy of master over slave, and white over black, in other ways as well. On the verge of standing, the kneeling slave is still bound to the earth, while Lincoln towers above him. The trappings defining the terms of cultural participation-books, proclamations, symbols of nation-are all on the side of Lincoln. Meanwhile, the black man remains naked, lacking attributes of power. While aspiring to represent a new era, Ball's Emancipation Group uses the traditional language that blocks new ways of imagining black identity. His freed slave gazes up, as if hearkening to his new status. Yet his individuality is crushed by the weight of old assumptions.

Sculpture, naturalism

A philosophical movement in which truth can be ascertained by sensory perception, and the virtues of honesty and simplicity are valued

Sentimentalism

The Freake-GibbsLimner, Elizabeth Freake And Baby Mary, C 1674. Book: Many portraits, however, were commissioned in pairs-images of husband and wife at the time of marriage or arrival of first born child- to commemorate the formation of couples and the joining of families that would, through their offspring, continue a lineage. While many of these paired portraits have been separated over the intervening centuries, two portraits executed in Boston by an unknown painter in 1671 (with additions in 1674) of John Freake and his wife, Elizabeth Clarke Freake, and their baby Mary, have remained together (figs. 3.13 and 3.14). Painted on canvases of equal size,, the two figures turn toward each other while directing their gazes to the viewer. To a seventeenth-century observer, the outward gaze accomplished two things: it established a bond of intimacy with the viewer (assumed to be a family member or friend), and it reminded the viewer of the Freakes' high social station, their right to command authority with their eyes. For viewers today, their eye contact creates a sense of psychological immediacy, which erases the centuries between our time and theirs. These canvases, like almost all colonial portraits, are unsigned. When a name is affixed to the surface or the back of the canvas, it is usually that of the sitter. Such images are about the patron, his spouse, and his progeny- not about the artist. The portraitist who executed these two images is known as the Freake-Gibbs painter, identified by his patrons rather than by his own name, which has been lost to history. From the similarity of these works to paintings executed in England a century earlier, we can conclude that the painter was probably trained in an English country town where older styles of painting- we call them Tudor or late medieval-persisted into the seventeenth century. First, we observe an evenness in focus-the buttons and laces are as precisely depicted as the facial features. Secondly, the painter is more interested in surface pattern than in giving us an illusion of rounded forms occupying three-dimensional space. We can conclude from these two characteristics-overall precise focus and emphatic surface pattern-that the patrons, the painter, and the culture they inhabited valued surface design over the illusion of pictorial space. That more "Renaissance" way of understanding painting as a window onto a three-dimensional world would come later, when new ideas about the picture plane as a field of illusion-its dramatic light and shadow simulating a reality continuous with our own-took hold. The Puritan emphasis on deco- rative surfaces would give way over the next half century to a new interest in the body as a three-dimensional object placed within the empirical world. Later, as we shall see in the portraits by, for instance, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, dress will be sub- ordinated visually to face and hands. Costume will appear less sharply focused than the sitter's flesh. As viewers, we are drawn to scrutinize faces: we give them visual priority. Our eyes see only a small area in sharp focus in any given moment, leaving the rest of our visual field more impres- sionistic, and causing us to "scan" any scene of reasonable size. Puritan portraiture cuts against this tendency of vision by highlighting all parts of the surface equally. The result is that Puritan portraiture can seem old-fashioned to us today.John Freake, as suggested by his silky locks, wide lace collar, pliant kid gloves, pendant jewel, and multiplicity of silver buttons, was a successful man: a merchant, brewer, and ship owner. When he died, shortly after these two paintings were completed, an inventory of his belongings described a household rich in imported luxury goods. The portrait of his wife and infant daughter (the artist h,ls written in paint on the surface of the canvas ''.Aetatis Suae 6 math," Latin for "at the age of 6 months" to the left of the child) adds bright primary and vibrating complementary colors to the exuberant material world of these aflluent Puritans. Intricate lace on Mrs. Freake's collar and skirt, and delicate needlework on the baby's bonnet, suggest a lively aesthetic sense as well as wealth. But Mrs. Freake and her daughter are also described as good Puritans. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Freake modestly covers her hair, a symbol of faithfulness among married women and chastity among unmarried ones in Puritan culture. Both she and her child wear the petticoats (meaning "small coats" or skirts) that are emblems of their subordination to males. John Freake stands and Mrs. Freake sits stiflly, and little Mary, swaddled straight under her skirts, is held as erect as possible, suggesting her potential for a morally upright life. For the Puritans, the body in its natural state was tied to nature in its fallen mode: unredeemed and dan- gerous. The curled-up body of an infant, which we today understand as natural, signified for the Puritans a failure of discipline. Salvation required that the body be subdued and transformed into the geometry of an orderly, civilized life. Attached to the back shoulders of Mary's dress are straps by which her mother will help hold her upright as soon as she is strong enough to try to stand and walk. By her posture and her clothing, Mary's body and mind are being formed to be good, and to exhibit her progress for others to see.

portrait

A representation of an individual meant to characterize the "typical" features associated with any ethnic, cultural, or religious group, usually in a distorted, exaggerated, and negative manner

Stereotype/Type

A landscape that uses soft color, curving forms, gradation of light, smallness, and symmetry to create a scene of harmony and pleasure

The Beautiful

A landscape marked by asymmetry, irregularity, variety, or surprise, creating a pastoral world neither fully wild nor overly cultivated

The Picturesque

A landscape that inspires awe or terror, evokes the infinite nature of the universe, or makes humans seem small and insignificant//asthetic categories

The Sublime

Jan Verelst, 1710 "The Four Kings": Tee Yee Ho Ga RoworHendrick Tejonihokarawa,Emperor of the Six Nations Book: a Mohawk in European clothing,cross-cultural movement,uggest the possibility that in America-unlike Europe, with its rigid class system- a man could remake himself according to his ambition and talent,Set in an illusionistic landscape (fig. 2.22), he appears as a sophisticated statesman, dressed in gentle- men's shoes with silver buckles, dark hose, and a long black waistcoat over a white linen shirt. Atop this he wears a scarlet blanket, an item of trade that Indians rapidly adopted as their own. In his right hand he holds a wampum belt. Its pattern of repeated crosses is perhaps symbolic of the delegation's quest to ask the queen for a missionary from the Church of England. Behind Hendrick lurks a wolf, symbolizing Hendrick's membership in the Mohawk wolf clan. Cast down on the ground before him is a tomahawk. Hendrick does not hold a weapon, for he is a diplomat, as the wampum belt indicates. Adopted by the Mohawks, first converted by Catholics, preparing for conversion to the Anglican faith, and dressed in British finery accented with Native and European trade items, Hendrick is the very picture of the cosmopolitan, moving between disparate worlds

portrait, Hybridity/Middle World

Eastern Woodland probably Mohawk or Seneca,War Club, found at site of Eastern Algonquian battle with English in Pioneer Valley, MA, c. 1675. Book: modification of an indigenous weapon-the wooden club-with some aspects of new weaponry included. The artist has examined European sabers with some care: the rais.ed line that extends down the club mimics the raised strengthening rib of a European saber, while the handle mimics its wire-wrapped hilt. The club ends in a carving of a wolf's head. The edge of this wooden "saber" is inlaid with both local shell and European beads-this combination of materials and form suggesting that the maker sought to copy a new weapon in materials that he understood. By doing so, perhaps he hoped to draw spiritual and military power from sources both local and distant. The small head with inset shell eyes incised on the club (fig. 2.15) may portray the object's owner. The head is abstract in its moonlike roundness, but the diagonal line bisecting the face and the three-pronged tattoo on the mouth surely denote an individual who would be recog- nizable to his peers, thus making it a portrait. Although a Native artist made this club for his own use, a white man acquired it in combat. A family tradition claims that Lieutenant John King of Northampton, Massachusetts got it in a 1676 battle; the club passed down through his family until the mid-twentieth century.

portrait, abstraction

George Catlin, Mah-To-Toh-Pa, "Four Bears," Second Chief, in Full Dress, 1832. Book: Catlin described Mah-to-t6h-pa as the second highest chief of the Mandan, but "the first and most popular man in the nation. Free, generous, elegant, and gentlemanly in his deportment-handsome, brave, and valiant; wearing a robe on his back with the history of his battles emblazoned on it which would fill a book themselves, if properly trans- lated." He explained that even the name "Four Bears" was given by his Assiniboine enemies, who admired Mah-to- t6h-pa for rushing into battle "like four bears." Catlin provided a full explanation of the meaning of the clothing Mah-to-t6h-pa wore for his formal portrait. His shirt, made of two soft mountain sheepskins, was ornamented with porcupine-quill embroidery medallions on the chest and bands down the seams on the arms and shoulders. Attached to the quilled seams are feathers and locks of hair. Catlin said that these locks were from enemies slain in battle (though on the Northern Plains, this could also be hair willingly given in tribute by a warrior's female relatives). While rather indistinct in Catlin's portrait, this shirt also bears drawings of scenes of bravery in war- fare, much like those on the shirt in figure 7.4 above. These episodes are amplified on the buffalo-skin robe discussed below. His leggings and moccasins were adorned with quillwork done by his female relatives. Catlin described the headdress of eagle feathers and ermine skins as "the most costly part of an Indian's dress in all of this country." While only high-ranking individuals could wear such a headdress, the real sign of Mah-to-t6h- pa's status were the split buffalo horns at the front of his headdress. Catlin remarked that only those "whose exceed- ing valour, worth, and power is admitted by all the nation" wore such emblems of power. When Mah-to-t6h-pa came to Catlin's tipi to pose for his portrait, he was wearing many other accoutrements that Catlin omitted from the portrait for simplicity's sake, but which we know from his written description. These included a bear claw necklace, a painted shield, a bow and a quiver full of arrows, a long pipe and tobacco sack, a belt holding his tomahawk and scalping knife, a beaver-skin medicine bag, and a war club. This would be the Plains equivalent of a four-star general dressed in full military rig, with all his medals, epaulets, ribbons, and stars. Each item is an emblem of the chief's rank and status, and each reveals some aspect of his military history. But to Mah-to- t6h-pa's mind, the most important aspect of his ceremonial dress was the feathered, steel-tipped lance he holds in his left hand in the portrait. It had been the lance of an enemy who killed Mah-to-t6h-pa's brother with it, and left it stuck in his body. Mah-to-t6h-pa took it, swearing to avenge his brother's death. Four years later, he traveled some distance to the Arikara enemy village, entered the tipi of the sleep- ing chief, and drove the lance through its previous owner's body. The warrior then scalped him, and returned home with both lance and scalp. Since all such stories of military bravery were told and retold around campfires, all who saw Mah-to-t6h-pa in his ceremonial splendor would recall his exploits. In the early nineteenth century, such garments were considered to exemplify the finest artistry of Plains people; the clothing itself was important and admired, whereas in Catlin's culture it was the painted representation of a man wearing such finery that was valued.

portrait, naturalism

The Freake-GibbsLimner, Elizabeth Freake And Baby Mary by John Freake??, C 1674. Book: Many portraits, however, were commissioned in pairs-images of husband and wife at the time of marriage or arrival of first born child- to commemorate the formation of couples and the joining of families that would, through their offspring, continue a lineage. While many of these paired portraits have been separated over the intervening centuries, two portraits executed in Boston by an unknown painter in 1671 (with additions in 1674) of John Freake and his wife, Elizabeth Clarke Freake, and their baby Mary, have remained together (figs. 3.13 and 3.14). Painted on canvases of equal size,, the two figures turn toward each other while directing their gazes to the viewer. To a seventeenth-century observer, the outward gaze accomplished two things: it established a bond of intimacy with the viewer (assumed to be a family member or friend), and it reminded the viewer of the Freakes' high social station, their right to command authority with their eyes. For viewers today, their eye contact creates a sense of psychological immediacy, which erases the centuries between our time and theirs. These canvases, like almost all colonial portraits, are unsigned. When a name is affixed to the surface or the back of the canvas, it is usually that of the sitter. Such images are about the patron, his spouse, and his progeny- not about the artist. The portraitist who executed these two images is known as the Freake-Gibbs painter, identified by his patrons rather than by his own name, which has been lost to history. From the similarity of these works to paintings executed in England a century earlier, we can conclude that the painter was probably trained in an English country town where older styles of painting- we call them Tudor or late medieval-persisted into the seventeenth century. First, we observe an evenness in focus-the buttons and laces are as precisely depicted as the facial features. Secondly, the painter is more interested in surface pattern than in giving us an illusion of rounded forms occupying three-dimensional space. We can conclude from these two characteristics-overall precise focus and emphatic surface pattern-that the patrons, the painter, and the culture they inhabited valued surface design over the illusion of pictorial space. That more "Renaissance" way of understanding painting as a window onto a three-dimensional world would come later, when new ideas about the picture plane as a field of illusion-its dramatic light and shadow simulating a reality continuous with our own-took hold. The Puritan emphasis on deco- rative surfaces would give way over the next half century to a new interest in the body as a three-dimensional object placed within the empirical world. Later, as we shall see in the portraits by, for instance, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, dress will be sub- ordinated visually to face and hands. Costume will appear less sharply focused than the sitter's flesh. As viewers, we are drawn to scrutinize faces: we give them visual priority. Our eyes see only a small area in sharp focus in any given moment, leaving the rest of our visual field more impres- sionistic, and causing us to "scan" any scene of reasonable size. Puritan portraiture cuts against this tendency of vision by highlighting all parts of the surface equally. The result is that Puritan portraiture can seem old-fashioned to us today.John Freake, as suggested by his silky locks, wide lace collar, pliant kid gloves, pendant jewel, and multiplicity of silver buttons, was a successful man: a merchant, brewer, and ship owner. When he died, shortly after these two paintings were completed, an inventory of his belongings described a household rich in imported luxury goods. The portrait of his wife and infant daughter (the artist h,ls written in paint on the surface of the canvas ''.Aetatis Suae 6 math," Latin for "at the age of 6 months" to the left of the child) adds bright primary and vibrating complementary colors to the exuberant material world of these aflluent Puritans. Intricate lace on Mrs. Freake's collar and skirt, and delicate needlework on the baby's bonnet, suggest a lively aesthetic sense as well as wealth. But Mrs. Freake and her daughter are also described as good Puritans. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Freake modestly covers her hair, a symbol of faithfulness among married women and chastity among unmarried ones in Puritan culture. Both she and her child wear the petticoats (meaning "small coats" or skirts) that are emblems of their subordination to males. John Freake stands and Mrs. Freake sits stiflly, and little Mary, swaddled straight under her skirts, is held as erect as possible, suggesting her potential for a morally upright life. For the Puritans, the body in its natural state was tied to nature in its fallen mode: unredeemed and dan- gerous. The curled-up body of an infant, which we today understand as natural, signified for the Puritans a failure of discipline. Salvation required that the body be subdued and transformed into the geometry of an orderly, civilized life. Attached to the back shoulders of Mary's dress are straps by which her mother will help hold her upright as soon as she is strong enough to try to stand and walk. By her posture and her clothing, Mary's body and mind are being formed to be good, and to exhibit her progress for others to see.

portrait, naturalism

Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872, 7 x 12 ' Part of manifest destiny

sublime?