Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

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

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.

Colby College Sesquicentennial Project: Art In Maine; Or, Colony, Province And State - The Role Of Maine In American Art, Colby College

Archives of Maine Art

A statement of purpose.

The State of Maine offers the locale for a penetrating study of the visual arts as they relate to a people and a geographical setting. This study can reach fruition in three distinct but related ways: as an exhibition of the works of art themselves; in the establishment of a permanent repository for photographs, factual data and source material; and as a book combining good reproductions and an authoritative text. Each of these will be discussed separately later in this report.

As a region, Maine is perhaps uniquely qualified to reveal the scope of American art …