Nowadays, when the achievements of 19th-century American painters enjoy the attention and support of the critics, the academy, the museums, the art market and a significant segment of the art public, it may be worth recalling that the elevation of these painters to their current status as American classics is a relatively recent historical development. Read More
Nowadays, when auction prices for paintings by the modern masters, both American and European, are zooming into the stratosphere and even the work of some quite mediocre modernists enjoys a lively market and fetches amazingly flattering reviews in the mainstream press, the old controversies over the influence of the European avant-garde on American art seem Read More
The great Thomas Eakins exhibition, which was reviewed here when it opened last fall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see The New York Observer for Oct. 15, 2001) has now come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It hardly needs saying that everyone with an interest in the art of painting will want to Read More
For a large part of the American art public, the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) stands alone and unrivaled as the classic American representative of the
Realist style. With subjects ranging from water sports and baseball to affectionate scenes of domestic life and portraits that are penetrating character studies of his Philadelphia contemporaries, Eakins Read More
It is the melancholy fate of certain artists to be remembered by posterity for a single example of their work, and the American painter Thomas Pollock Anshutz (1851-1912) is one of them. In many histories of American art, a painting by Anshutz called The Ironworkers’ Noontime (1880) is credited with establishing the American industrial scene Read More
