"Masterpieces of American Furniture, edited by Anna Tobin D'Ambrosio, the Curator of Decorative Arts since 1989 at Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, offers concise, engaging text accompanied by exquisite photography. Essays on more than 65 finely crafted examples of American furniture encompass nearly every nineteenth-century style and explore the careers of America's preeminent cabinetmakers and shops including Charles Baudouine, Hugh and John Finlay, Edward Hutchings, John Henry Belter, Herter Brothers, R. J. Horner & Co., Kimbel and Cabus, Kilian Brothers, J. and J. W. Meeks, Anthony Quervelle, and M. & H. Schrenkeisen Mfg. Co. Each footnoted essay offers perceptive new research into historical antecedents, stylistic preferences, manufacturing techniques, and the complex nature of the nineteenth-century furniture trade."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854), known during his lifetime as the "United States Rage," to this day remains America's best-known cabinetmaker. Establishing his reputation as a purveyor of luxury by designing high-quality furniture for New York's moneyed elite, Phyfe would come to count among his clients some of the nation's wealthiest and most storied families. This richly illustrated volume covers the full chronological sweep of the craftsman's distinguished career, from his earliest furniture-- which bears the influence of his 18th-century British predecessors Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Hope--to his late simplified designs in the Grecian Plain. More than sixty works by Phyfe and his workshop are highlighted, including rarely seen pieces from private collections and several newly discovered documented works. Additionally, essays by leading scholars bring to light new information on Phyfe's life, his workshop production, and his roster of illustrious patrons. What unfolds is the story of Phyfe's remarkable transformation from a young immigrant craftsman to an accomplished master cabinetmaker and an American icon."--Publisher's website.

Sanford Gifford (American, 1823-1880), a leading Hudson River School landscape painter and a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was so esteemed by the New York art world that, at his untimely death, the Museum mounted a show of his work-the first monographic exhibition accorded any artist-and published a Memorial Catalogue that, for nearly a century, remained the principal source on his oeuvre. Gifford's art, which was inspired by the work of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, and by that of British artist J.M.W. Turner, and enriched by his travels in Europe (from 1855 to 1857, and from 1868 to 1869), came to be called "air painting," for he made the ambient light of each scene-color saturated and atmospherically potent-the key to its expression. His approach to painting and his unique style gave rise to a highly distinctive body of work with enchanting and mesmerizing effect. This publication examines seventy paintings by the artist and includes comparative illustrations of related works by Gifford, his Hudson River School mentors and colleagues, and those painters, in addition to Cole and Turner, who exerted influence on his art, including Frederic Edwin Church and John F. Kensett. The essays discuss Gifford's place in the Hudson River School, his numerous Catskill Mountain subjects, his experiences and perceptions as a traveler both at home and abroad, and the variety of his patrons. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.