American Painting in the National Gallery of Art [antikvár]

American Painting The native flavor of American painting is partly determined by the types of subjects our artists have chosen. Working under the patronage of a predominantly middle-class society, American painters have found little demand for subjects favored in Europe by court and church. Our interest has been in our surroundings — our people, landscapes, familiar objects, and scenes of everyday life. Our painters have described this external world of fact with honesty, clarity, and precision. Their realistic approach may be said to reflect our national traits, which are frequently characterized as practicality, industry, and love of material things. The American is also known for his geniality; and a buoyant, optimistic spirit is often in our pictures. These native qualities may be seen in The Sargent Family (page 13), painted by an artist whose name has been forgotten. Whoever he was, his stiff, rather crudely modeled figures suggest that he had little training. His painting is folk art, of a kind classified as indigenous to America because its practitioners had little contact with Europe.