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The course considers landscape and genre painting within the framework of American culture from, roughly the Jacksonian and antebellum periods. We will investigate the ideological dimensions of these works, and consider how they contributed to the construction of a 19th century American national identity. We will explore the stylistic and ideological dimensions of landscape in the art of Thomas Cole; Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand; and Luminist painters such as John Frederick Kensett and Martin Johnson Heade. We examine the construction of American identity in depictions of everyday life by genre painters such as William Sidney Mount, Richard Woodville and Lilly Martin Spencer. We will consider how these artists' images of a variety of Americans inform our ideas abut gender, race, class, and regional "types" of the pre-Civil War period. Readings are drawn from key literary texts of the period (including work by William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriett Beecher Stowe) and methodologically diverse art historical studies.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ART Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.
Last Updated on MAR-30-2006
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459