American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. First. Hardbound. VG, DJ has small nick on front edge. Burnt orange cloth boards with color pictorial DJ, [xviii] 222pp, hundreds of color and BW figures. From the publisher--Divided into four chronological sections, the book begins with the years surrounding the American Revolution and the birth of the new republic, when painters such as Copley, Peale, and Samuel F. B. Morse incorporated stories within the expressive bounds of portraiture. During the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War decades from about 1830 to 1860, Mount, Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others painted genre scenes featuring lighthearted narratives that growing audiences for art could easily read and understand. From 1860 to 1877, artists like Eastman Johnson, Homer, and Eakins responded to the Civil War and, going forward, encoded Reconstruction and the Centennial in pictures designed to help heal the nation's spirit. After the Centennial, Homer and Eakins—joined by colleagues who included William Merritt Chase, Sargent, Cassatt, Sloan, and Bellows—explored new subjects and narrative modes in the increasingly cosmopolitan age leading up to World War I. The result is a visually compelling account of the stories American artists chose to tell, how they told them, and how those stories have been read by observers over time.