The Interpretation Of Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi's Image In The Portraits Of American Artists

Journal of Art Studies ◽

10.52853/25792830-2021.2-175 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 175-197

Author(s):

Ani Margaryan

Keyword(s):

Chinese Culture ◽

American Art ◽

Still Life ◽

Aesthetic Movement ◽

Oil Paintings ◽

Early American ◽

Artistic Value ◽

American Artists ◽

The Veil ◽

Number Of Publications

The Chinese themes in Early American art have long been obscured under the veil of Japonisme, Aesthetic movement, boundary-pushing modernism and more significantly because of the political circumstances - decline of China as an empire and complicated Chinese-American interconnections. One of the favoured theme of American academism at the period of the late 19th- early 20th centuries were genre scenes, street scenes, portrait d’intérieur , portraits, still life works related to China and Chinatowns. Nonetheless, the American press through the imagery created by illustrators and caricaturists was largely involved in interpretations of Western encounters with Chinese culture from the highlighted negative light, either being deeply affected by anti-Chinese flows or fuelling those xenophobic moods. Consequently, a few American artists featured Chinese people and Chinese settings from the perspective of admiration of their “otherness”. Only two American artists- Katherine A. Carl and Hubert Vos, succeeded to pave their career path to the Chinese court, enriching American arts of the early 1900s with the unprecedented depictions of high rank Chinese and the scandalously renowned empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) in the positive light of fascination. A number of publications have viewed and examined those portraits from the angle of "political self-fashioning”, but our research is another academic attempt to place those oil paintings in the context of China-related subject matter and its extension in the rising American art of the previous century, stressing their artistic value, function and their relations to the intended audiences.

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Revealing the Fugitive Palette of the Early American South: A SERS Study of Eighteenth-century Oil Paintings

Studies in Conservation ◽

10.1080/00393630.2021.1961391 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-13

Author(s):

Marisa A. Choffel ◽

Carolyn G. Farling ◽

Kristen A. Frano ◽

Mary K. Matecki ◽

Zhaoyun Zheng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

American South ◽

Oil Paintings ◽

Early American

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Catalogue of paintings in oil and pastel by J. Alden Weir, N.A., member of the society of American Artists, Water Color Society and Pastel Club; honorable mention, Paris Salon; figure prize of the Water color Society; prize, American art Association and J

10.5479/sil.838689.39088017681701 ◽

1889 ◽

Author(s):

Keyword(s):

American Art ◽

Water Color ◽

Honorable Mention ◽

American Artists ◽

Paris Salon

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On the Blackness of Post-Blackness

Black and More than Black ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496824516.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 33-60

Author(s):

Cameron Leader-Picone

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Art ◽

Original Formulation ◽

African American Art ◽

Linked Fate ◽

Racial Categorization ◽

Individual Agency ◽

Black Art ◽

American Artists ◽

African American Artists

This chapter argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbormirrors post-Black art’s emphasis on simultaneously rejecting and embracing the racial categorization of African American art. In doing so, Whitehead’s novel represents a qualified liberation for African American artists that optimistically imagines a freedom from racial categorizations that is still rooted in them. This chapter analyzes Whitehead’s novel in the context of the competing definitions of post-Blackness offered by Touré in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? as well as in the original formulation by Thelma Golden. Employing a framework of “racial individualism,” the chapter argues that a loosening sense of linked fate has led to the privileging of individual agency over Black identity. In doing so, post-Blackness serves to discursively liberate African American artists from any prescriptive ideal of what constitutes black art without implying either a desire or intent to not address issues of race.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Victorian Literature ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0126 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Sophia Andres

Keyword(s):

Second Phase ◽

Women In Literature ◽

Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽

Aesthetic Movement ◽

Oil Paintings ◽

Italian Poetry ◽

Pre Raphaelites ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

The Impact ◽

Modern Artists

Dante Gabriel Rossetti—major founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, leader of the Aesthetic movement, a key influential figure on Victorian poetry and art—is widely recognized as the Victorian poet-painter genius who defied Victorian conventions in his life and work. Rossetti’s first book, The Early Italian Poets (1861), which includes Dante’s Vita Nuova, introduced medieval Italian poetry to English audiences; a decade later in 1874 his Dante and His Circle was primarily a revision of his early book concentrating on Dante. Beginning with watercolors, inspired by medieval literary works and paintings on religious subjects, Rossetti switched in the second phase of his career to sensuous Venetian-style oil paintings of voluptuous femme fatales distinguished by their long necks, luxuriant flowing hair, and rosebud mouths. Throughout his career, Rossetti often interwove literature and art by either seeking the inspiration of his sensuous women in literature or by composing sonnets as companion pieces to the paintings. In this respect, neither the verbal (often the spiritual or psychological) nor the visual or physical, may be interpreted in isolation; the picture poem must be experienced in its totality. Unlike William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti never exhibited, but he worked on private commissions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has attracted innumerable Victorian, modern, and postmodern works on his poetry and painting, ranging from interpretive, biographical, psychoanalytical to sociopolitical and cultural studies, to name but a few. It is just about impossible to subsume all these works under categories that this iconoclastic genius (who resisted any limitations imposed by his critics) would possibly approve. Scholars interested in Rossetti’s poetry and prose may have access to various Victorian editions and modern collections. Comprehensive and authoritative, as well as an invaluable resource for beginning and advanced scholars, the Rossetti Archive includes his poetry, prose, correspondence, and strikingly beautiful reproductions of his drawings, watercolors, illustrations, and paintings. Rossetti’s eccentric lifestyle has attracted numerous biographies. Gender, race, class, and politics in Rossetti’s works, poetical and painterly, are also subjects explored by postmodern scholars. Exhibits and catalogues of Rossetti’s paintings abound, ranging from those devoted to specific time periods or subjects in Rossetti’s art—such as literary topics, his double works of art, portraiture, aesthetic representations of beauty—to the connections of his art with other Pre-Raphaelites. The reciprocal influence on other contemporary poets and artists, in particular Pre-Raphaelite painters, the impact of his art on aesthetes, symbolists, and modern artists are also subjects of interpretive criticism and exhibits. Though Rossetti did not compose music, his poetry has inspired several popular musical compositions. His notorious lifestyle, on the other hand, has been the subject of works of fiction, television, theater and film, most of which have taken liberties with biographical information in attempts to make it even more sensational to postmodern audiences.

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Paint for the Many? Rereading William Sidney Mount's The Painter's Triumph

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300001460 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 28 ◽

pp. 155-184

Author(s):

Elisabeth L. Roark

Keyword(s):

19Th Century ◽

Visual Arts ◽

American Art ◽

The Public ◽

The Common ◽

Common Man ◽

American Artists ◽

The Many ◽

Ordinary Folk

The Painter's Triumph, created by William Sidney Mount in 1838, has long been interpreted as an icon of the democratization of American art (Figure 1). Nearly every scholarly analysis of the painting frames it in the context of Mount's well-known charge to himself, “Paint pictures that will take with the public, in other words, never paint for the few, but for the many.” The farmer's enthusiastic involvement in the artist's work is viewed as emblematic of Mount's commitment to promoting the visual arts among ordinary folk. The painter's “triumph,” most assert, is his ability to reach the common man. This is certainly an appealing message and consistent with the desire to see mid-19th-century American artists as resolute democrats in tune with Jacksonian cultural reforms. Yet, Mount never called it The Painter's Triumph, referring to it only as “artist showing his work,” and there is no evidence that viewers in the late 1830s and early 1840s recognized a particularly democratic message. The current title first appeared in a catalogue in 1847, long after Mount sold the painting and two years after the death of Edward L. Carey, the man who commissioned it. Despite the 1847 title change, in his later autobiographical sketch Mount referred to the painting as “Artist showing his own work.”

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