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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
'Not Unworthy Of His Hand': Crossing Borders In Benjamin West's A Drayman Drinking, Lauren K. Lessing, Terri Sabatos
'Not Unworthy Of His Hand': Crossing Borders In Benjamin West's A Drayman Drinking, Lauren K. Lessing, Terri Sabatos
Faculty Scholarship
In May 1797, Benjamin West—President of the Royal Academy, Historical Painter to the Court of King George III, and Surveyor of the King's Pictures—exhibited a small genre painting titled A Drayman Drinking at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London. It was one of seven paintings West exhibited that year, and the only one overlooked by the reviewer for the Times. The critic's oversight may have stemmed from the unprecedented number of paintings on view (nearly twelve hundred, four hundred more than were hung the previous year) and the resulting overcrowding of the principle exhibition room. Through his …
Angels In The Home: Adelicia Acklen's Sculpture Collection At Belmont Mansion, Lauren K. Lessing
Angels In The Home: Adelicia Acklen's Sculpture Collection At Belmont Mansion, Lauren K. Lessing
Faculty Scholarship
Following the Civil War, the wealthy plantation owner Adelicia Acklen redecorated her villa, Belmont, near Nashville, Tennessee, with white marble ideal sculptures by the American sculptors Randolph Rogers, Chauncey Ives, Joseph Mozier, and William Rinehart. During the war, Acklen had compromised her reputation as a genteel Southern lady by bargaining with Union officers in order to sell her cotton at exorbitant wartime rates. By purchasing and displaying a collection of statues that embodied the ideal of true womanhood, Acklen hoped to publicly redomesticate both her home and herself and to express her affinity for the ideology of the Lost Cause.
New Perspective: Rereading Seymour Joseph Guy's "Making A Train", Lauren K. Lessing
New Perspective: Rereading Seymour Joseph Guy's "Making A Train", Lauren K. Lessing
Faculty Scholarship
In March 1868 a reviewer for the Commercial Advertiser described a small painting on view in Seymour Joseph Guy’s Tenth Street studio in Manhattan. It depicted a young girl preparing for bed and holding around her waist “a gaudy skirt of a dress, its folds, draped behind her, forming a train. From her shoulders a single garment hangs loosely, disclosing her neck and finely rounded shoulders.” The painting, originally titled The Votary (or Votaress) of Fashion, is now known as Making a Train. Visually complex, beautifully painted, and disturbing in its sensual presentation of a prepubescent female body, Making a …
Ties That Bind: Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave" And Nineteenth-Century Marriage, Lauren K. Lessing
Ties That Bind: Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave" And Nineteenth-Century Marriage, Lauren K. Lessing
Faculty Scholarship
On an April evening in 1859, Louise Corcoran, the only child of fabulously wealthy banker, philanthropist, and art collector William Wilson Corcoran, married George Eustis Jr., a United States congressman from Louisiana, in her father’s Washington, D.C., mansion. A “select circle” of more than one thousand guests witnessed the ceremony, which took place in Corcoran’s private art gallery. Writing of the wedding for Harper’s Weekly, George Washington Jenkins noted that one of the original versions of Hiram Powers’s celebrated marble statue The Greek Slave stood at one end of the gallery, “in a bay window which forms a fitting shrine.” …
Unveiling Raphaelle Peale's "Venus Rising From The Sea -- A Deception", Lauren K. Lessing, Mary Schafer
Unveiling Raphaelle Peale's "Venus Rising From The Sea -- A Deception", Lauren K. Lessing, Mary Schafer
Faculty Scholarship
New technical information uncovered by conservator Mary Schafer has revealed an earlier, unfinished composition beneath the margins of Raphaelle Peale’s circa 1822 trompe l’oeil painting “Venus Rising from the Sea—a Deception.” The earlier version of the painting featured a partial copy of Charles Willson Peale’s 1817 portrait of Raphaelle seemingly concealed behind the same white kerchief that now appears to hide a copy of James Barry’s 1772 painting “The Birth of Venus.” Schafer and art historian Lauren Lessing reinterpret Peale’s painting in light of these findings, describing its complex nature as both a physical object and a dark visual joke.
Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, And The Effacement Of Labor, Sharon L. Corwin
Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, And The Effacement Of Labor, Sharon L. Corwin
Faculty Scholarship
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the pursuit of efficiency came to dominate instances of industrial and artistic production: the engineering consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth attempted to visualize a language of minimal waste, while Precisionist art achieved its own aesthetic of efficiency. This essay examines the Precisionist project alongside the discourses of the rationalized factory and suggests a relationship between the formal economy of Precisionism and the rhetoric of scientific management. For Precisionist art and the Gilbreths' time-motion studies, the representation of efficiency ultimately entailed the elision of artist and worker as producers of labor.