John Wilmerding

This magnificent volume, featuring more than 750 illustrations, is the first definitive account of the Tonalist movement. Based on original research, it tells the fascinating story of how the progressive Tonalist landscape first dethroned the Hudson River School in the late 1870s and went on to become the dominant school in American art until World War I. More provocatively, it also situates Tonalism at the beginnings of American modernism, revealing how the movement’s later exponents laid the groundwork for the artists of the Stieglitz Circle, and subsequently Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Wolf Kahn. A History of American Tonalism places the key figures of the movement — such as George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, and John Henry Twachtman — in their cultural context, which was influenced by such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William James. It also examines the lives and careers of more than 60 other Tonalist painters, lesser known but highly talented. This new edition of A History of American Tonalism is augmented with more than 100 new illustrations, as well as a new overview of the stylistic principles of Tonalism. It will continue to be essential in understanding not only the Tonalist movement but American art as a whole.

This book celebrates and interprets eyeglasses in American art through painting, prints, folk art, sculpture, and photography from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. Accompanying an exhibition at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, the book includes eighty works by illustrious artists such as Mary Cassatt and Alice Neel. Though we know eyeglasses are for looking through, we often overlook their role in portraits and figure images. This survey looks at their appearance and uses in American art, from 1784 when Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal, to the present day. Spectacles in artwork served as emblems of literacy, fashion, and self-identity; old age and wisdom; inner or psychological vision; and sometimes just contemplation. Contemporary works include bespectacled self-portraits by Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring; and eyeglasses as pure design by Alex Katz and Wayne Thiebaud.

Twenty-five essays on great works of American art and design from the “Masterpiece” column in The Wall Street Journal. John Wilmerding’s “Masterpiece” column is among the The Wall Street Journal’s most popular features. This book gathers those essays by Wilmerding, the distinguished former curator of American art at the National Gallery. Each essay integrates a detailed visual analysis with insights not only into the art and its creator, but also into the historical context at the time of the artwork’s execution.American Masterpieces features a full-sized reproduction of each sculpture, painting, piece of architecture, and photograph discussed. Some such as Mary Cassatt’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” (along with pieces by Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth) are well known. Many others (such as Henry H. Richardson’s Crane Memorial Library in Quincy, Massachusetts) are largely unregarded. No matter how well you know art, you are certain to make new discoveries. This broad, representative, and eclectic selection of the best this country has produced is for anyone looking for a smart, opinionated, and always engaging guide to American art and art history.

The art of distinguished realist painter and watercolorist, Allen Blagden.“There was a long bench in the living room of our house. And it was full of paper, crayons, watercolors—all the essentials for creating art.” And so begins Allen Blagden’s account of his career, training with his father, an art teacher at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. From his earliest days, art informed Allen Blagden’s life, taking him to the National Serengeti Park in Kenya, to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, to the South of France, England, and Ireland, to the Adirondacks and Maine.Blagden’s watercolors, renowned for their color, compositions, and technique, are held in the permanent museum collections across the United States and by countless private collectors. From detailed pencil drawings that illuminate texture and form, he builds on that foundation to create memorable and accurate renditions of his subjects, and his field of vision is encompassing, ranging from portraits of friends, to landscapes, to birds and mammals of all shapes and sizes. An intense sensitivity and precision pervades his work, elevating even the simplest objects to an emotional crescendo. Keeping in the tradition of Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, these works are timeless classics.

Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum s trove of American paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and abstraction, Webb s visionary endeavour presented a new story of the United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own valuable artistic traditions. This handsome book features the best of Shelburne s American paintings, including works by colonial painters John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius, Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.

A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expres- sionism, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well- connected existence. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much- anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. With a carefully curated selection of the artist's best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter's expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter's influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter's paintings.

Frederic Church, the acclaimed Hudson River School artist, first traveled to Maine in 1850. Over the next decades Church ventured repeatedly from his New York State home, Olana, to explore the Maine coast and its rocky islands. He also frequently trekked inland to visit Mount Katahdin. Maine provided sensational sunsets, robust waves crashing on rocky shores, and an abundance of wilderness well suited to Church's artistic vision. Maine Sublime brings together all of the artwork in the Olana collection resulting from and inspired by Church's travels, from finished oil sketches that Church selected to mount, frame, and display at his home to pencil sketches and cartoons that he stored in portfolios. The subjects include such specific locations as Sunset Bar Harbor (1854) and works like Sunset (ca. 1852–65) and Twilight a Sketch (1858), which were inspired by dramatic Maine skies and are evocative of the region as a whole. Throughout his life, Church would continue to visit Maine, sketching, fishing, and hiking. In 1878 he bought land on Lake Millinocket with a view of Katahdin and built a simple cabin. After Church's marriage in 1860, his wife Isabel often joined his excursions to Maine. In a witty cartoon included in this catalog, Frederic and Isabel Church on Mount Desert Island, Church captures his wife's admiration of the scenery. Maine Sublime accompanies an exhibit of Church's Maine artwork that will be displayed at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine) from June to September, 2012; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from February to May 2013; and the Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery at Olana (Hudson, New York) from July to October, 2013.

The Princeton University Art Museum's collection of American drawings and watercolors is impressive in both scope and quality, providing a comprehensive overview of the nation's artistic traditions. This lavishly illustrated book highlights seventy-seven master drawings and watercolors chosen from the museum's extensive collection. The selections, which range from the eighteenth century to the present, are by such eminent American artists as Benjamin West, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Bontecou, and Tom Wesselmann. A group of outstanding works by Hudson River School and Ash Can artists also distinguishes the collection. Each of the selected drawings and watercolors is reproduced in full color and is accompanied by an in-depth catalogue entry. The book also features an introduction by John Wilmerding describing Princeton's history of collecting American art, as well as an essay by Kathleen A. Foster on the historiography of American drawings and watercolors. A useful checklist of the Museum's entire collection of over 1,300 American drawings and watercolors, selectively illustrated in color, concludes the book.This beautiful and informative volume clearly demonstrates that the holdings of the Princeton University Art Museum represent an extraordinary resource for students, scholars, and those with a love of American art and art history.