Images of women were ubiquitous in America at the turn of the last century. In painting and sculpture, they took on a bewildering variety of identities, from Venus, Ariadne, and Diana to Law, Justice, the Arts, and Commerce. Bailey Van Hook argues here that the artists' concepts of art coincided with the construction of gender in American culture. She finds that certain characteristics such as &"ideal,&" &"beautiful,&" &"decorative,&" and &"pure&" both describe this art and define the perceived role of women in American society at the time. Most late nineteenth-century American artists had trained in Paris, where they learned to use female imagery as a pictorial language of provocative sensuality. Van Hook first places the American artists in an international context by discussing the works of their French teachers, including Jean-L&éon G&ér&ôme and Alexandre Cabanel. She goes on to explore why they soon had to distance themselves from that context, primarily because their art was perceived as either openly sensual or too obliquely foreign by American audiences. Van Hook delineates the modes of representation the American painters chose, which ranged from the more traditional allegorical or mythological subjects to a decorative figure painting indebted to Whistler. Changing American culture ultimately rejected these idealized female images as too genteel and, eventually, too academic and European. Angels of Art is the first study to discuss the predominance of images of women across stylistic boundaries and within the wider context of European art. It relies heavily on contemporary sources both to document critical responses and to find intersecting patterns in attitudes toward women and art.

"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was a new thing to daughters of that period."—The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote Mary Hallock made what seems like an audacious move for a nineteenth-century young woman. She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, where they were imbued with the Unity of Art ideal, an aesthetic ideology that made no distinction between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities. These women became painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. They were encouraged by some of the era's best-known figures, among them Tribune editor Horace Greeley and mechanic/philanthropist Peter Cooper, who blamed the poverty and dependence of both women and workers on the separation of mental and manual labor in industrial society. The most acclaimed artists among them owed their success to New York's conspicuously egalitarian art institutions and the rise of the illustrated press. Yet within a generation their names, accomplishments, and the aesthetic ideal that guided them virtually disappeared from the history of American art. Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape in which spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans succeeded in reuniting art and industry. In this interdisciplinary study, April F. Masten situates the aspirations and experience of these forgotten women artists, and the value of art work itself, at the heart of the capitalist transformation of American society.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the American girl seemed transformed - at once more introspective and adventurous than her counterpart of the previous generation. For the first time, girls claimed the attention of genre artists, and though the culture still prized the demure female child of the past, complementary images of angel and tomboy emerged as competing visions of this new generation. Published in conjunction with a travelling exhibition organised by the Newark Museum, Angels and Tomboys explores the diverse ways nineteenth-century artists portrayed girls, from the sentimental stereotype to the free-spirited individual. Works by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, together with those by leading women artists such as Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt, reveal a new, provocative psychological element not found in early Victorian portraiture, while the mischievous tomboys in Lilly Martin Spencer's paintings and the pure angels in the works of John George Brown underscore the complexity of young girlhood - and of representing that evanescent phase. Essays by Holly Pyne Connor, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Sarah Burns, and Lauren Lessing consider the artworks' historical, social, and literary contexts, drawing on sources as varied as etiquette books, poems, censuses, and histories of medicine and economics. With more than 130 illustrations - including paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs - this book is an illuminating view of what it meant to be young, female, and American in the nineteenth century.

Includes material on the New York School, Pop art, Feminist Art Movement, and Latina artists.