Research Catalog

Moved to tears : rethinking the art of the sentimental in the United States

Title
Moved to tears : rethinking the art of the sentimental in the United States / Rebecca Bedell.
Author
Bedell, Rebecca Bailey
Publication
  • Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2018]
  • ©2018

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library JQE 19-96Schwarzman Building - Art & Architecture Room 300

Details

Description
xi, 220 pages : illustrations (some color); 25 cm
Summary
In 'Moved to Tears', Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, Bedell argues that major American artists-from John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale in the eighteenth century and Asher Durand and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth-produced what was understood in their time as sentimental art. This was art intended to develop empathetic bonds and to express or elicit social affections, including sympathy, compassion, nostalgia, and patriotism. Much sentimental art of this era was animated by and invested with socially transformative ambitions. Trumbull and Peale deployed their sentimental creations in the urgent effort to stabilize the new nation in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Through his work, Tanner opposed the virulent anti-Semitism of fin-de-siecle France. Even artists such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, who had absorbed something of modernist disdain for sentimentalism, were aware of its commercial potential and popular appeal and negotiated complex relations with it.
Subject
  • Sentimentalism in art
  • Art > United States > History
  • Art > United States > Themes, motives
  • Art
  • Art > Themes, motives
  • United States
Genre/Form
History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-209) and index.
Contents
The revolutionary art and politics of sentiment: Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull -- Sentiment and social change: slavery, race, and the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner -- Andrew Jackson Downing and the sentimental home -- Sentimental landscapes -- Sentimental Homer -- Strategic sentimentalism: John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
Call Number
JQE 19-96
ISBN
  • 0691153205
  • 9780691153209
LCCN
2017957437
OCLC
1032582804
Author
Bedell, Rebecca Bailey, author.
Title
Moved to tears : rethinking the art of the sentimental in the United States / Rebecca Bedell.
Publisher
Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2018]
Copyright Date
©2018
Type of Content
text
still image
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-209) and index.
Research Call Number
JQE 19-96
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