p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} In just three years, between 1893 and 1896, Frederick William MacMonnies’s Bacchante and Infant Faun evolved from a clay sketch in the artist’s Paris studio to the most controversial sculpture in the United States. Perceptions of the sculpture, which depicts an over life-size dancing woman who gleefully holds an infant in one arm and grapes aloft in the other, still range from provocative to innocuous. This Bulletin provides a close examination of Bacchante and Infant Faun, a work most frequently associated with the scandal that led to its acquisition: the public uproar over the impropriety of the figure’s nudity and her apparent inebriation spurred its original owner, architect Charles McKim, to withdraw it as a gift to the Boston Public Library and give it to The Met instead. While earlier studies focused almost exclusively on the controversy, this Bulletin takes a fresh look at one of the icons of the American Wing, from its origins in the artist's Beaux-Arts training to its place in the rich tradition of the bacchante as a subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art.

Whether you're looking for a history of one of the city's world-class museums or for a fascinating story about Boston's popular North End, Susan Wilson covers it all in Boston Sites and Insights. Divided into six sections that reflect the diversity of people, activities, and landmarks within the city, this fascinating book leaves no stone unturned. With practical, up-to-date information in an "Essentials" section at the end of each chapter as well as fresh retellings of popular legends and lore, Wilson provides everything the modern visitor or current resident needs to know to enjoy the multicultural city of Boston, Massachusetts."

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depictions of New England flooded the American art scene. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Julian Weir, and other well-known artists produced images of quaint villages, agricultural labor, scenic rural churches, and the distinctive New England landscape. Julia B. Rosenbaum asks why and how a range of artists--including Impressionist and Modernist painters and sculptors--and exhibitors fashioned this particular vision of New England in their work. Against the backdrop of industrialization, immigration, and persistent post-Civil War sectionalism, many Americans yearned for national unity and identity. As Rosenbaum finds, New England emerged as symbolic of cultural and spiritual achievement and democratic values that served as an example for the nation. By addressing the struggles for national unity, the book offers a new interpretation of turn-of-the-century American art. Ultimately, Visions of Belonging demonstrates how the local became so important to the national; how art was crucial to the formation of national identity; and how internal nation building takes place within the realm of culture, as well as politics. And even as later artists, such as Georgia O'Keeffe, challenged New England's cultural hegemony, the appeal of linking regional identity to national ideals continued in distinctive ways.Beautifully illustrated with color plates and almost sixty halftones, Visions of Belonging explores the interplay between art objects and the shaping of loyalties and identities in a formative phase of American culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century studies, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American studies, New England history and culture, and American cultural and intellectual history.