Books on American art

Frequently, museum staff gets asked by students and museum docents for book recommendations ... "I want to read more about American art. What should I go and buy?"

Most curators possess very long, extensive reading lists, but that can be overwhelming for the person with interest but who tries not to live American art 24/7. They really want me to suggest a book, not 200-plus.

This brief list focuses on 19th century American art.

Here are three books that are likely on the shelves of American art scholars, but are written in ways that make them easily accessible to a person with just an interest in art topics. They make good, entertaining reading ...

Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)

A book about alcoholism, murder, grave-robbing, slave revolt, drugs, sex, family secrets, female temptresses/monsters and … art. Professor Sarah Burns discusses the gothic pattern in American paintings and its parallels to the gothic strain in American literature. She presents the biographies of landscape painter Thomas Cole and genre painter/outsider David Gilmour Blythe and their images of nature and urban spaces, respectively. Other chapters deal with the racial fears and fantasies of Washington Allston, John Quidor, and William Rimmer. Burns then presents the imaginative, gothic realism of Thomas Eakins, and fantasies of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Elihu Vedder.

John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)

John Davis focuses on the nineteenth-century American painters – especially James Fairman and Frederic Church - who, along with archaeologists, evangelists, photographers, tourists, and writers, visited in biblical Holy Land. Using biblical associations, American painters (as part of the larger culture) and other visitors looked at the landscape of the Holy Land as an extension of American identity.

Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991)

Elizabeth Johns studies American genre painting – scenes of “everyday life” … rustic dances, horse trading, farmers resting, cider making, etc. – and reads the images in terms of pre-Civil War American politics. Paintings by George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others reflect the social, religious, ethnic and political issues of antebellum America.