A three-volume guide to the early art and artists of Ohio. It includes coverage of fine art, photography, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} At the height of the Arts and Crafts era in Europe and the United States, American ceramics were transformed from industrially produced ornamental works to handcrafted art pottery. Celebrated ceramists such as George E. Ohr, Hugh C. Robertson, and M. Louise McLaughlin, and prize-winning potteries, including Grueby and Rookwood, harnessed the potential of the medium to create an astonishing range of dynamic forms and experimental glazes. Spanning the period from the 1870s to the 1950s, this volume chronicles the history of American art pottery through more than three hundred works in the outstanding collection of Robert A. Ellison Jr. In a series of fascinating chapters, the authors place these works in the context of turn-of-the-century commerce, design, and social history. Driven to innovate and at times fiercely competitive, some ceramists strove to discover and patent new styles and aesthetics, while others pursued more utopian aims, establishing artist communities that promoted education and handwork as therapy. Written by a team of esteemed scholars and copiously illustrated with sumptuous images, this book imparts a full understanding of American art pottery while celebrating the legacy of a visionary collector.

This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism’s erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt’s profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872-1937) is best known for herfloral woodblock prints that range from delicate Japanese-inspiredstylizations to boldly colored and progressivelymodernist works. In her brief twenty-year career, Hopkins producedseventy-four known woodblock prints, including figurativework and landscapes as well as floral compositions. This catalogueraisonné is the first in-depth study of this once well-known Americanartist. It illustrates all of Hopkins's known prints, related drawings, andstudies. Born in Hudson, Michigan, Hopkins attended the Art Academy of Cincinnatifrom 1895 to 1898. In 1899 she took classes with the influential artist ArthurWesley Dow, an advocate of Japanese art. Following her marriage in 1904, Hopkinsand her husband settled in Paris, where they remained until the outbreakof World War I. After returning to America, Hopkins became part of a smallgroup of artists in Provincetown, whose innovations in woodblock printmakinghave come to be known as the Provincetown print or the white line woodcut. In1917, a visit to the Cumberland Falls region of Kentucky provided the inspirationfor some of Hopkins's most important prints which predate the work ofAmerican regionalist painters and printmakers by a decade or more. In addition to the catalogue raisonné, Edna Boies Hopkins includes much new biographical research along with a census of her prints and a comprehensive list of her exhibitions. Exhibition Dates Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, December 14, 2007-March 2, 2008 Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH, March 15-June 1, 2008 Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA, June 1-Aug. 3, 2008 Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 20, 2010-May 2, 2010

Between 1802, when the young Kentucky artist William Edward West began to paint portraits while on a downriver journey, and 1920, when the last of Frank Duveneck's students worked in Louisville, a large number of notable portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. In Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920, Estill Curtis Pennington charts the course of those artists as they painted a variety of sitters drawn from both urban and rural society. The work is illustrated, when possible, from The Filson Historical Society collection of some four hundred portraits representing one of the most extensive holdings available for study in the region. Portraiture involves artists and subjects, known as sitters, and is an art that combines elements of biography, aesthetics, and cultural history. Private portraits often attract an oral history that enlivens the more colorful aspects of local tradition and culture. Public portraits of towering figures such as George Washington, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln were often reproduced in printed format to satisfy popular demand and subsequently attained an iconic, timeless status. Lessons in Likeness is organized in two parts. Part One, the cultural chronology, serves as a backdrop to the biographies of the portrait artists. This section identifies stylistic sources and significant historical moments that influenced the artists and their milieus. Rather than working in isolation, portrait artists were connected to the world around them and influenced by prevailing trends in their trade. Early in the nineteenth century, for instance, Matthew Jouett journeyed to Boston for study with Gilbert Stuart, and upon his return to Kentucky painted in a style that subsequently influenced an entire generation. Later artists, notably Oliver Frazer and William Edward West, studied the lessons of Thomas Sully in Philadelphia. Sully popularized the lush, warmly colored, and highly flattering style of portraiture practiced by many of the itinerant artists whose careers were facilitated by the introduction of steam and rail travel. The Civil War provoked a dramatic shift in the cultural terrain, further augmented by the rise of photography and the emergence of academic art centers. Painters who had previously worked with a master painter, or learned on their own, were now able to study at established schools, especially in Cincinnati, which became one of the leading centers for the teaching of art in late nineteenth-century America. Several of the teachers there, Frank Duveneck and Thomas Satterwhite Noble in particular, had firsthand experience with avant-garde European styles, notably the realism and naturalism practiced in Munich and Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then taught in the art schools of New York and Philadelphia. Part Two profiles the artists from this area and period who have appeared in previous art historical literature and have an identifiable body of work represented in public and private collections. Individual biographies provide details of the artists' lives, sources for further study, and locations of works in public collections.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.