American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915

AMERICAN STORIES: PAINTINGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE. 1765 - 1915

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
October 12, 2009 - January 24, 2010
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
February 28, 2010 - May 23, 2010
American Stories is a beautiful exhibition, worth every penny of its exorbitant $20 admission fee.
One walks into the room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is immediately greeted by
long-lost friends, usually seen only on the pages of art history books--Paul Revere (1768) and Watson
and the Shark (1778) both by John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt's The Cup of Tea (1880- 81)--with
the rest of the excellent paintings spread out in, beckoning in rooms beyond. The Paintings of
Everyday Life span a remarkable period in American history, the time when we were becoming
American. The exhibition tells more than stories, it tells who and what we were. But these works
are not history, for the artists interpreting or narrating life as they understood it. The last paintings
done for the show were completed one hundred years ago and we view them with the eyes of those
who know what we have become.

John Singleton Copley. Watson and the Shark (1778)

The first rooms focus on the transition from the early American painters, one step beyond the
charming limners of the past. Clearly these artists lack the rigorous training of their European
counterparts. There is no Jacques Louis David in the making. Perhaps because early American
artists of the Eighteenth Century could make a living only as portraitists, we meet the Early
Americans as specific individuals who are affluent enough to pay to have their aristocratic selffashioning recorded for the ages. As elegant and as wealthy as they look, our ancestors are also
endearing, due to the artists' somewhat awkward grasp of anatomy. The heads of their subjects are
slightly enlarged and seem to rest unsteadily on the well-clad bodies, as in Copley's Portrait of Mr.
and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (1773). Proportions of the body are slightly off but all the details are
carefully outlined and proffered as attributes of the successful upwardly mobile and aristocratically
inclined upper classes. The wall text explains that the by-play between the married couple of

Charles Wilson Peale's Portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788) is delightfully sexual
(despite the big heads). Benjamin is holding a long hose-like walking stick that points towards
Eleanor who is wearing a virtuously white dress. The phallic stick points to her crotch, and a pile of
carefully cradled fruit in her lap reinforces the prediction of future fecundity.
By the next century, such innocent Freudian slips are rare. American artists are better trained and
even folksy artists, such as Lily Martin Spencer and George Caleb Bingham, are producing
handsome and well-painted works. Winslow Homer and his successors of the Ash Can School can
hold their own with European trained artists, William Merritt Chase and Thomas Eakins. But for
sheer virtuosity, few can equal the dazzling brushwork of European trained artists, such as Mary
Cassatt or John Singer Sargent at the end of the century. But the formal accomplishments of the
American artists are less interesting than the story of America recounted in the paintings. The young
country was absorbed in defining itself as a new world of new people who are creating a new way of
life offered the artists a wide range of stories to tell. The exhibition is centered upon genre paintings
and leaves out landscape paintings, unless they contained a narrative. Even though their original
social matrix has vanished, these paintings still act out theatrical tales that lend themselves to
interpretation. The wall text provided by the museum is fanciful but seems to be possible within the
historical context. The reader is not informed whether the statements come from scholarship or
from the curator's reading of the art, but, ultimately, the paintings themselves tell the most
interesting stories.
The artists of the nineteenth century were more open minded or more observant of the great variety
of Americans compared to today's contemporary popular culture, which is ubiquitously white and
middle class. Perhaps because the artists of the past were literally present at the creation of a new
nation, they avidly recorded everything "American," as "America" came into being. These painters
would have been only a generation or two from immigrants, and, indeed, many of the artists were
recent arrivals from the Old World themselves. They were white and male, although a few females
dared, here and there, to make art. They or their parents were of European origin and the sheer
novelty of "America" was still very real. Today, we are more settled into our American identity. We
have become very set in our definition(s) of what it means to tell an "American story." In comparison
to today's selective gazes, focused on niche sites, the painters in American Stories were eclectic
collectors of the sights of the American scene. Because American history had yet to be written and
the judgment of our collective deeds had yet to be passed, our national sins were recorded with the
same openness as our national virtues were depicted.
The uniqueness of America is its diversity. The nation was forged from a disparate group of people,
who were locked in a life and death struggles for dominance and survival. From the very beginning,
Europeans were driven by their lust for land and wealth. Land had to be seized from the Native
Americans at gunpoint. The vast lands the Europeans grabbed were too large for a single family to
manage. The colonials needed agricultural workers and the cheapest laborers were those captured
in Africa and sold to plantation owners and businessmen. If America was a second Eden, the sins of
theft, genocide, and slavery were present from the start. American Paintings records the uneasy
and unspoken bargain with God, who, it was hoped, was white. With all apologies, God, we were
despoiling Eden in your name. It is important to remember that the audience of the time for these
works was white and middle class, upwardly mobile and ambitious. What we see today as revealing
of an ideology of racism and imperialism would have been viewed in the nineteenth century as
simply "American stories."
For the first half of the exhibition, slavery was legal in many states in America, and by midnineteenth century, only in the South. Legal or not, the second-class, subservient position of AfricanAmericans was taken for granted from the Constitutional founding of the nation to the end of the

Civil War in 1865. The marginal role of the blacks in a democracy, founded upon the principle of "all
men are created free and equal" appears over and over in the art. The inclusion of AfricanAmericans in what Alfred Boime called "The Art of Exclusion" changes after the Civil War. After
1865, African-Americans are more likely to be shown in all black groups, segregated from whites.
Whites are portrayed as the upper class in opulent interiors or as recent immigrants, urban poor, in
tenements. Then by the beginning of the twentieth century, questions of race are replaced with
issues of immigration and urban life among the lower classes. The exhibition, intentionally or not,
traces the inclusion followed by the exclusion, followed by the disappearance of blacks from
American painting.
What we see in these paintings are generations of Americans who were aware of what they were
doing but were unwilling to confront the meaning and the consequences of their actions. The races
live together but the gaze of the white painters is oblique and ambiguous. What are they trying to
record? What stories are left behind for us to read? In 1813, John Lewis Drimmel painted the folk
work, The Quilting Frolic (1831), which creates a horizontal display of early American life stretched
out in infinite detail. Although the catalogue describes the painting as "democratic," it is, in fact, an
examination of an already solidifying class system.

On the left is a family preparing for the party: the quilt is being stretched on its frame and a little
boy helps himself to the prepared food before the party begins. Two white servants seem to be
caught off guard, in the act of getting ready for the party. A black child, who carries a tray with a
blue and white tea service, assists the staff. An elderly white man and his dog, staying warm by the
blazing fire, complete the group. On the right, the upper class white guests arrive, well-dressed in
spring attire and self-assured in their casual attitudes. They don't look much like they would be
interested in quilting. Indeed most of the arriving guests are top-hatted men and carefree young
women. It is unclear whether they are accompanied by or are greeted by a black servant fiddling at
the front door. Whoever the guests are, they are obviously of a higher class that the staff depicted on
the right.
These two black servants, a little girl and an adult male, are depicted with bulging eyes, gleaming in
the whites, and full red lips, parting to display large white teeth. Their African heritage is fully on
display: they are the Other, dehumanized and kept carefully in their visual place. The little girl is
burdened and fixed in place by her heavy tray. The man is wearing tattered clothes, handed down
from a white man. Like all of African Americans, he is musically inclined, or so the whites thought.
William Sidney Mount painted a young black man in The Power of Music (1847) who is also
entranced by music, reinforcing the white belief that African Americans were "naturally" musical.
The man in this painting has features that are far more human and much less a caricature, but he is
a mere eavesdropper on the white men who are the ones allowed to make music. A year later,

Richard Caton Woodville featured the same marginality of African-Americans in War News from
Mexico. The first declared war of American imperialism was waged on another power, Mexico, only
recently released from their Spanish colonial masters. African-Americans were excluded from
service in this war, but the black man at the far right of the all-white group listens to the reports
from the front as avidly as the other men. After all, he is an American, too. Indeed, the rapt little
girl, who is standing next to him, wearing the rags of servitude, will live to see the end of slavery.
America was already occupied by a people the Europeans called "Indians," when the whites arrived.
At first there were thoughts of sharing the vast wilderness and the bounty of the new land, but these
thoughts were fleeting and soon dissolved into hostile encounters. The First Contact ended in death
and disease and by the early nineteenth century, the Native Americans were the Vanishing
Americans, living on borrowed time, somewhere west of the Mississippi. Only when whites venture
into the West, do they again encounter that other American race, the Native Americans, who once
again stand in the way of Manifest Destiny and its remorseless expansion. Racial issues and racial
competition are everywhere. George Caleb Bingham, as early as 1845, noted the frequent fact of
interracial mixing in his Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. This peaceful scene showed a French
fur trader and his son by a Native American woman and their bear cub, gliding impassively along the
mirror like river. Once they set foot on land, the boy becomes a "half-breed." The father and son are
more at home on the fringes of the frontier.

For the Native Americans, time is catching

up with them. The settlers are on their way,
and the 1840s and 1850s are the last
decades before the land-hungry whites
overwhelmed the native population. It is
during these years that George Catlin was
painting portraits of a dying civilization,
paradoxically at the peak of its glory. The
forts he visited were at the edges of the
reach of American authority. Here on the
frontier, soldiers and warriors of the plains
mingled with traders in a brief moment of
uneasy peace. But the territory is already a
contested one. Charles Deas revels in the violent fantasies of the fight over territory in The Death
Struggle (1845) in a painted pulp fiction tale of the Wild West. A trapper and a warrior and their
horses plunge over the edge of a cliff to their doom. From our vantage point, we know that both are
soon going to be extinct. In a more peaceful vein, Seth Eastman's Chippewa Indians Playing
Checkers (1848) is an indication of how the pastimes of white culture have already impacted leisure
time of the "Indians."
In 1845 William Sidney Mount painted Eel Spearing at Setauket. In 1855 Charles Felix Blauvel
painted A German Immigrant Inquiring His Way. Even though we know that Mount had to re-gender
the black spear fisherman to a black woman to make the adult less threatening to whites, both
paintings show an easy co-existence between Americans of African extraction and white people of
European ancestry. "Easy" coexistence does not mean necessarily "equal" in this newly forming
country. Ideology informs the brushstrokes which glaze over the conflicting dialectics of democracy
and servitude. The subtext of all of the paintings is the assumed superiority of the white race--even
children--over the black or red races. The coexistence can continue---however tenuously---only if the
status quo is unchallenged. The Civil War disrupts the separate existence of the races and upends

the previous balance of power. The art made after the Civil War shows the whites living in their
world and the blacks living in their world. The interracial interactions seen before the war ceased
to be depicted.
Eastman Johnson painted what would be the last of Negro Life in the South in 1859. He provided his
curious white audience with a rare glimpse into the private quarters of the slaves on a plantation. It
is unlikely that white women would venture into this alien territory, which would have been
supervised by the slaves themselves and, possibly, the plantation overseers. But from the growing
number of children of mixed race, we understand that white men, probably the master of the
plantation and his sons would have been very familiar with the slave quarters. The great secret of
these plantations was the unspoken fatherhood of many of the slaves. White women were expected
to close their eyes to their husband and son's mixed race children sired outside marriage. White
men were socialized to accept that fact that their children and grandchildren would be consigned to
a lifetime of servitude. There are several shades of skin tones in Johnson's painting: on the left a
very light-skinned young woman is being courted by a darker skinned young man. Accompanied by
a young black woman, a young white woman enters stage right. We have no idea why she is there.
She looks too young to be the mistress of the plantation, but the museum wall text suggested that
she is seeking her black kin. It is highly unlikely any white woman would know of much less
acknowledge her brothers and sisters of color. We are left to wonder what Johnson was hinting at in
his theatrical setting. Thomas Le Clear's Young America (1863) is a transition work of art, painted
during the Civil War, probably in the North. Carefree white youngsters of middle school age are
playing outdoors, while a slightly older African-American teenager watches on the fringes.
These paintings draw the lines between the racial groups: the young white girl is sneaking into a
place she does not belong; the black teenager is not allowed to play with the white children. Not
until the Civil War are the races brought together. According to the catalogue, the artist, Theodor
Kaufmann served with the Union army when the war moved into the South. As the federal troops
marched from one Confederate capital after another, the slaves ran, literally for their lives, toward
freedom and their only protectors, the Union army. The military was overwhelmed by the presence
of the runaway slaves, men, who wanted to serve and fight for their country, women and children
who had no where else to go. On to Liberty (1867) shows a group of women, dressed in simple
working clothes, light weight and light colored dresses, leading their children in the direction of the
Union army. When the painting was completed, the war was over, and the South was occupied by
the victorious federal troops. But by the time Winslow Homer painted The Cotton Pickers in 1876,
Reconstruction was over, the occupying army had withdrawn leaving the former slaves to their fate
at the hands of a South determined to regain control over the errant black population.
What is interesting about these two paintings is the lack of whites. The African-Americans are
alone. The interaction with whites is over. The women in Homer's painting could be the women
imagined ten years earlier by Kaufmann. They are still in the South, still working on the very land
where their ancestors were enslaved. These women are undoubtedly sharecroppers. They have
earned the land they work, but they do no own it. Beautiful and unhappy, they appear stoic and
calm, standing among the indifferent cotton plants, silhouetted against the sky. Somehow we place
this painting as a pendent to Homer's earlier, The Veteran in a New Field of 1865. The veteran is
white and harvests his own wheat crop. The viewer understands that the African-American women
are harvesting, not their own fields, but those of their former (and present) master, or someone very
much like him. Farming and endless labor is all the women know.
But a few paintings of African-Americans indicate some measure of progress. Sunday Morning by
Thomas Hovenden and A Pastoral Visit by Richard Norris Brooke, both of 1881, show quiet domestic
scenes among African-American families. These groups are lower class but not destitute. In fact,

their living conditions are positively palatial compared to the actual situation of African-Americans at
the time. The simple but well-appointed interiors must have been idealized. Photographs taken by
Margaret Bourke-White in the 1930s as she traveled throughout the South, recorded that, forty
years later, African Americans were living in shacks. The interior walls, without insulation, were
covered with newspapers, illustrated by pictures of consumer goods out of the reach of black
people. Having formed their own separate culture and social groups, blacks in the paintings of the
1880s appear to accept their lower class situation with contentment. At least they are slaves no
longer.
Clearly, a national ideology was at work in the art world of the nineteenth century. What is unclear
is the extent to which the artists were critiquing society or whether they were responding to
changing social attitudes. The existence of an artist in America was too tenuous to overtly challenge
the collectors and audiences without due cause. After the Civil War, people were tired of war and
conflict and we can, perhaps it is best read these paintings as attempts to record and reconcile race
relations. It would seem that the only way to acknowledge racial differences was to keep the races
separate in these documents of color. The only African-American artist shown in this exhibition,
Henry Ossawa Tanner, depicts a grandfather giving his grandson The Banjo Lesson. The year was
1899. The century is nearly done. During the early twentieth century, the people of color disappear
from art made by white people.

The stories not told are compelling in their absence. We do not see paintings of the continued
genocide in the West, the lynchings and the reign of terror in the South, and the grinding poverty of
the poor of all races. Artists of the nineteenth century delineated class and racial differences very
carefully. What we are seeing in these racially-based paintings is a social arrangement. The first
arrangement is slavery and servitude and the second arrangement is segregation and servitude.
Both arrangements are strategies of separation of the races. Both arrangements guarantee white
power. Neither arrangement was made with the consent of the oppressed group. Under the
brushes of the artists, the non-white races are kept frozen in time, trapped in their social place,
caught between historical slavery and current subservience, between the noble savage and the
marauding savage. People of color were carefully constructed as compliant with their supposed
destiny. "They" accepted their supposed inferiority. Meanwhile, Americans who are white evolve
and change, migrate and move and improve their status, leaving Americans of color behind in the
historical dust of their Gilded Age.
America has always considered itself "white" and "European" and even today there are those who
work hard to repel those who also claim the identity "American." Those to be denied are those who
are neither white nor European. But the whiteness of America is but one political ideology. There
is another defining belief in what makes "America," and that is the belief in American inclusiveness.

America is a brave new world because it is the first world to welcome all who come to its shores.
For some, it is the European cultural heritage of America that guarantees its "exceptionalism;" for
others, it is the diversity, the complexity, the changeability, and the inclusion of the nation that
constitutes its "exceptionalism." The American Story told in this exhibition is one of Difference and
Otherness, living side by side, but never coming together to form one America. Perhaps that day
will come.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
[email protected]
http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/american-stories-paintings-of-everyday-life-1765-1915/