American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings―of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk―served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation―arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. 
Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices―and not a blissful celebration of American democracy―that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life

Arts & Photography

Johns, Elizabeth

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

This publication accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the National Gallery of Australia. It features some fifty American and fifty Australian landscape paintings produced during the period when landscape became the focus for artists in both countries. In both traditions landscapes trace the ever-changing complexities of bringing what is known to the experience of the unknown, exploring the profound relationship that we have with the land on which we live. Many of America's finest landscape painters are represented, including Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase. Australian artists include Joseph Lyatt, Augustus Earle, John Glover, Eugene von Guerard, Louis Buvelot, and Arthur Streeton, among others.

New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes

Sayers, Andrew

Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin

Ellis, Amy

National Gallery of Australia

Wadsworth Atheneum

Thames&Hudson

With close analysis of Homer's art and of the personal challenges he faced throughout his life, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation is the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between the artist's work and the psychological stages of his life. Elizabeth Johns uses theories advanced by Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson to look at Homer's evolution as a painter and a person within the context of the continuing dynamics of his family. Her incisive and absorbing readings of the artist's work take into account the developmental stages of young, middle, and late adulthood, analyzing what Homer painted at the various turning points in his life. With this psychosocial approach, Johns examines the wood-engraved illustrations of Homer's early career in relationship to the values of his family; his images of the Civil War in the context of his young manhood; his paintings of the social scene and young women's place in it in connection with his own potential for marriage; his images of fisherwomen at Cullercoats and fishermen at Prout's Neck as they relate to his interior vision during middle age; and his intrigue with the sea in his late works as an identification with the larger processes of the universe. With more than seventy-five black-and-white illustrations and forty color plates of arresting images by this American master, Winslow Homer takes into account all available documentation, including the rich trove of the artist's correspondence at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and his entire body of work—illustrations for wood engravings, watercolors, and oils.

Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation

University of California Press

New Worlds From Old

Why did Thomas Eakins, now considered the foremost American painter of the nineteenth century, make portraiture his main field in an era when other major artists disdained such a choice? With a rich discussion of the cultural and vocational context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth Johns answers this question.

Thomas Eakins

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

Why did Thomas Eakins, now considered the foremost American painter of the nineteenth century, make portraiture his main field in an era when other major artists disdained such a choice? With a rich discussion of the cultural and vocational context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth Johns answers this question.

Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life

To Be Modern: American Encounters with Cezanne and Company

Yount, Sylvia

University of Pennsylvania Press

Andrew Abbott was the last man standing; all of his friends had succumbed to leg shackles. Now that he had sold out from the army, he was unsure how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. His father proposed sending him back to restore their burned plantation in America, but just as he was set to leave, he met the woman of his dreams. Gwendolyn Lambert's family was reduced to penury after her father was disgraced and killed in a duel. Gwen and her invalid mother survive on a mere pittance in the city of Bath. Her mother's cousin, the Dowager Duchess of Loring, is determined to see Gwendolyn taken care of and restored to her rightful place, but she does not have any use for society after her family was treated ill by them. But the savvy dowager has a few tricks up her sleeve, including her handsome and charming grandson. Unfortunately, she did not count on him being sent to America or Gwendolyn's father's family coming back into the picture. The entire Loring-Abbott clan becomes involved in a scheme to bring Andrew and Gwendolyn together, but will they be able to overcome being separated by oceans, storms, and the interference of scheming mamas?

Shadows of Doubt: Traditional Regency Romance (Loring-Abbott Series)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Elizabeth Johns

The Dowager Duchess of Loring, had finally married off all her grandchildren and was now uncertain what her future held. When she accompanies her grandson and his new wife on trip to Italy, a chance encounter with a past love turns her world upside down. For over thirty years, Luca Faranese, Conte de Salerno, has tried to forget about the woman who stole his heart. Fate gives them a second chance, but will their love be enough to keep them together forever the second time?

Second Dance: An Encore Novella (Loring-Abbott Series)

Romance

Historical

When two people have walked through fire, can love bring the healing and help they need? Spurned by love, Lady Margaux Winslow has no use for the other eligible gentlemen of London. Despite her beauty, her sharp tongue soon earns her a reputation as a dragon. Convincing her parents to let her retreat to their Scottish estate, a home for abandoned young women, Margaux feels she can do something meaningful with her life. At their wits' end, her parents believe a few months in seclusion will teach her to appreciate her privileged existence, and accept the next gentleman of worth who offers for her. Margaux has no plans to yield. But neither she nor her parents bargain for the proximity of the gorgeous, blue-eyed Scotsman on the neighbouring estate. Gavin Craig, content with his life as a country doctor, is unexpectedly thrust into the world of aristocratic society after the accidental deaths of his brother and nephews. With all the duties his new title entails, and his adoption of three orphans, Gavin desperately needs a wife. She should preferably a lady, trained since birth to manage a noble house, servants and family. His former disdain for a marriage of convenience has been rapidly overcome by the colossal task of learning to run a large Scottish barony. One lovely candidate is right next door … except that she's inexplicably determined to be a spinster…

Through the Fire: Traditional Regency Romance (A Series of Elements)

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Books by Johns, Elizabeth