Eleanor Jones Harvey

George Gurney

Virginia M. Mecklenburg

Fine landscape masterpieces in the Hudson River tradition, including Sanford Robinson Gifford's The Marshes of the Hudson (1878), light-filled impressionist canvases, such as Mary Cassatt's Reading "Le Figaro" (1877-78); dazzling Gilded Age glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and paintings by John Singer Sargent; gritty Ashcan records from a dynamic New York City, such as George Bellow's Noon (1908); vivid aesthetic creations of the modern age; the triumphant abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning; and resonant contemporary works by Andrew Wyeth and David Hockney are shared here. During the twenty years of the American Art Forum's existence, art of the American West has achieved a major place among art historians and collectors. This is reflected in the inclusion of major canvases by Georgia O'Keeffe, such as Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), John Marin's Taos Canyon, New Mexico (1929), and James Earle Fraser's moving bronze sculpture, End of the Trail (1918).

Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections

Variations on America

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.

The Civil War and American Art

"Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the most influential scientists and thinkers of his age. A Prussian-born geographer, naturalist, explorer, and illustrator, he was a prolific writer whose books graced the shelves of American artists, scientists, philosophers, and politicians. Humboldt visited the United States for six weeks in 1804, engaging in a lively exchange of ideas with such figures as Thomas Jefferson and the painter Charles Willson Peale. It was perhaps the most consequential visit by a European traveler in the young nation's history, one that helped to shape an emerging American identity grounded in the natural world. In this beautifully illustrated book, Eleanor Jones Harvey examines how Humboldt left a lasting impression on American visual arts, sciences, literature, and politics. She shows how he inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans, and extol America's wilderness as a signature component of the nation's sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt's ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian Institution, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service. Alexander von Humboldt and the United States looks at paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts, and features works by leading American artists such as Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Frederic Church, and Samuel F. B. Morse"--

Eleanor Jones Harvey

Books

Your next favorite book is out there