Making American Taste Narrative Art for A New Democracy

Edited by Barbara Dayer Gallati. Contributions by Linda S. Ferber, Ella M. Foshay and Kimberly Orcutt

Published by GILES in association with the New-York Historical Society

Publish Date — November 2011 (UK and USA)

Dimensions — 324 pages, 254 × 292 mm, (11½ x 10 in.), landscape

Illustrations — 80 colour and 85 b & w

Hardback price — UK£40.00/US$65.00

ISBN — 978-1-904832-76-8

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Press Release — Making American Taste

News — “When Applying the Paint Was Spreading the News”...

Sales Points

“An important contribution to nineteenth-century American art scholarship.” The Magazine Antiques

“Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy is the latest in a sequence of stellar publications that throw open new windows onto the holdings of the New-York Historical Society, making the artworks more accessible and launching them with current interpretive scholarship.” Katherine Manthorne, Professor of American Art, Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Making American Taste“adds greatly to our understanding of how nineteenth-century paintings told stories, while documenting our own age’s interest in the complexity of those tales and the narrative process.” Marc Simpson, Associate Director of the Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williams College.

“A readable catalog makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of this too-often ignored and undervalued class of painting and sculpture.” Bruce Cole, Wall Street Journal

“Focusing on the remarkable holdings of the New-York Historical Society, this landmark publication is exquisitely illustrated with both recognized and underappreciated masterpieces….By discussing the artworks in their rich cultural context, these thought provoking texts enhance our understanding of each individual piece and the society that fostered their production.” Holly Pyne Connor, Ph.D., Curator of 19th-Century American Art, Newark Museum

“This book does not confine itself to the high ground of acknowledged “masterpieces.” Instead, it candidly surveys the uneven and uncertain terrain of art and art appreciation, while digging down to expose the tangled roots of taste formation in a disorderly new democracy that was still trying to figure out what should be “American” about American art.” Sarah Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor, Indiana University

“Making American Taste” dives into the core of narrative art—carrying the reader from the antebellum period to the end of the century—through the esteemed collections of the New-York Historical Society. Along the way, we encounter works of art we’ve long considered quaintly irrelevant and are reintroduced to the paintings and sculptures we thought we knew well.” Rebecca E. Lawton, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

About the Book

Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy is a landmark publication on American art from 1825–1870. A significant contribution to our understanding of taste and collecting in America during this period, it presents 55 paintings from 38 artists drawn from the New-York Historical Society’s newly restored, and superb collection of narrative art.

American art at this time was dominated by powerful arguments about what constituted true art: should it be for the many, or the educated few, and should specifically American art forms and styles be favoured over more traditional, academic, European traditions. Making American Taste accompanies an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, November 11, 2011 - August 19, 2012; travelling to Taft Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 20, 2013–January 12, 2014; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, February 13–May 19, 2014; Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, October 11, 2014–January 4, 2015

About the Author(s)

Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of William Merritt Chase (1995) and Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004) and a coauthor of Winslow Homer: Illustrating America (2000) and Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007). Linda S. Ferber is vice president and senior art historian of the Museum at the New-York Historical Society. She was formerly Andrew W. Mellon Curator and chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized and coauthored Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007). She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County (2001) and Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement (1998), with Barbara Dayer Gallati. Ella M. Foshay is an independent art historian. When curator of paintings and sculpture at the New-York Historical Society, she produced the catalogue Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (1990) for an exhibition that re-created Reed’s private art gallery as it would have looked in his house in 1835. She is also the author of Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art (1984), John James Audubon (1997), and, with Barbara Novak, Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Cullen Bryant (2000). Kimberly Orcutt is curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society, where she organized the exhibition John Rogers: American Stories. She served as assistant curator of American art at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and curated the exhibition Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the Bruce Museum. She is chair emerita of the Association of Historians of American Art.