One of a series of systematic catalogues of the National Gallery of Art's collection, this comprehensive volume discusses in detail 310 objects that comprise one of the world's outstanding repositories of American naive paintings. Works by renowned folk artists such as Edward Hicks, Erastus Salisbury Field, and Ammi Phillips are represented in depth and placed in stylistic as well as historical context. This catalogue is an indispensable tool for historians of Amerian painting and folk art, and for students of American life and culture. Thorough documentation and commentary are provided for the first time on some of the most intriguing images produced in America in the past two hundred years.

This book presents watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts in the Index of American Design, a visual archive of decorative, folk, and popular arts made in America from the colonial period to about 1900. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States.

This volume is devoted to the American naive paintings in the National Gallery of Art, which has one of the most important collections of this kind in the world. Created outside the academic mainstream, these paintings show an extraordinary diversity of individual expression and serve as vivid documents of American culture. Most of the works formerly belonged to the collection of Colonel Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, who donated more than 300 paintings and about 100 drawings to the Gallery over nearly thirty years. Most date from the nineteenth century and a substantial number are by well-known folk artists, including Erastus Salisbury Field, Ammi Phillips, and William Matthew Prior. The breadth and depth of the collection is such that it is possible, in several cases, to trace the progress of an individual artist's style. Although the majority of works came to the Gallery without identification, through painstaking research it has been possible to make attributions, which are published here for the first time. Many of the works in the Gallery's collection of American naive paintings are reproduced here in color. The extensive catalogue provides a full history of the objects and artists, with technical notes as well as biographical and bibliographical information.