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America through the Lens of the Arts
The American artists returned home after travelling throughout Europe, brimming with enthusiasm and experience.
The artists who had painted Florence and Tuscany often found, on their return home, that their careers benefited enormously from the experience they had built up in the Old World. Whistler, Mary Cassatt and Sargent, on the other hand, elected Europe as their new home-although it is true to say that they felt like lifelong exiles.
Scenes of domestic intimacy are played out in interior settings, often portraying wives and children in affectionate poses with an intensity and spontaneity unknown in European painting.
The white of their dresses becomes a symbol of purity and youth, of the dynamism and optimism of the American middle class, and indeed of America itself-a metaphor of their awareness that they belonged to a New World in which the ideal of modern womanhood was taking shape, a world interpreted by Henry James and Edith Wharton.
Edmund Charles Tarbell (West Groton 1862-New Castle 1938)
The Breakfast Room
1902-3
oil on canvas
Philadelphia, Courtesy of the Pennsylvania, Academy of the Fine Arts, Gift of Clement B. Newbold
Michele Gordigiani (Firenze 1835-1909)
The Artist's Children in his Studio (sketch)
c. 1880
oil on canvas
Florence, Fondazione Carlo Marchi
Ernestine Fabbri
Teresa Fabbri
c. 1913-4
Photo
Drusilla Gucci Caffarelli
Lilla Cabot Perry (Boston 1848-Hancock 1933)
Lady With a Bowl of Violets
c. 1910
oil on canvas
Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay
Frank Weston Benson (Salem 1862-1951)
Summer
1909
oil on canvas
Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Bequest of Isaac C. Bates
Ernestine Fabbri
Edith Shepard Fabbri with her daughter Teresa and niece Tecla Ludolf at Bar Harbor
1899-1900
Photo
Drusilla Gucci Caffarelli
The artists who had painted Florence and Tuscany often found, on their return home, that their careers benefited enormously from the experience they had built up in the Old World. Whistler, Mary Cassatt and Sargent, on the other hand, elected Europe as their new home-although it is true to say that they felt like lifelong exiles.
Scenes of domestic intimacy are played out in interior settings, often portraying wives and children in affectionate poses with an intensity and spontaneity unknown in European painting.
The white of their dresses becomes a symbol of purity and youth, of the dynamism and optimism of the American middle class, and indeed of America itself-a metaphor of their awareness that they belonged to a New World in which the ideal of modern womanhood was taking shape, a world interpreted by Henry James and Edith Wharton.
Edmund Charles Tarbell (West Groton 1862-New Castle 1938)
The Breakfast Room
1902-3
oil on canvas
Philadelphia, Courtesy of the Pennsylvania, Academy of the Fine Arts, Gift of Clement B. Newbold
Michele Gordigiani (Firenze 1835-1909)
The Artist's Children in his Studio (sketch)
c. 1880
oil on canvas
Florence, Fondazione Carlo Marchi
Ernestine Fabbri
Teresa Fabbri
c. 1913-4
Photo
Drusilla Gucci Caffarelli
Lilla Cabot Perry (Boston 1848-Hancock 1933)
Lady With a Bowl of Violets
c. 1910
oil on canvas
Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay
Frank Weston Benson (Salem 1862-1951)
Summer
1909
oil on canvas
Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Bequest of Isaac C. Bates
Ernestine Fabbri
Edith Shepard Fabbri with her daughter Teresa and niece Tecla Ludolf at Bar Harbor
1899-1900
Photo
Drusilla Gucci Caffarelli
