American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

Part of what makes the Met so extraordinary is that it facilitates encounters among masterworks from every century and every corner of the world. This fall, visitors to the Museum can encounter under a single roof two very different exhibitions devoted to scenes of everyday American life. American Stories brings together paintings by fifty-two artists that date from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, while Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, the influential suite of black-and-white photographs that Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924) made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Read more »

Fall is an ideal time for American sports fans, as professional baseball, basketball, football, and hockey seasons overlap. It’s no secret that Americans love sports, and artists are no exception. American Stories features a number of iconic paintings that depict sports and games, including Thomas Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) and Winslow Homer’s view of encamped Union soldiers playing a game of quoits, or horseshoes (Pitching Quoits). Read more »

In honor of Election Day yesterday, I want to dedicate this week’s post to a discussion of George Caleb Bingham’s painting The County Election, which is included in “Stories for the Public, 1830–1860,” the second chronological section of American Stories: Read more »

American Stories features 103 outstanding paintings, including twenty-five canvases from the Met’s own collection, one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. It is especially exciting for us to be able to show these works while the American Wing’s paintings and sculpture galleries are closed for renovation. (These galleries are scheduled to reopen in 2011. Learn more about the renovation of the American Wing and the newly reopened Charles Engelhard Court and period rooms.) We’re also thrilled to include seventy-eight paintings from fifty-three public and private lenders, which, together with our own works, offer visitors an unusually thorough overview of the development of American narrative painting from about 1765 to about 1915. Read more »

American Stories is the product of several years of preparation, during which the curators planned the exhibition’s scope and narrative, negotiated loans and decided which works from the Met’s collection to include, wrote catalogue essays, and envisioned—at least generally—the arrangement of paintings in the galleries. The works are presented in four chronological groups, allowing visitors to observe the development of painting styles and story-telling devices over time, from portraits of the era of the Revolution to Ashcan pictures of the early twentieth century. Within each section, paintings appear in pairs or groups that encourage visitors to discover their shared themes. Read more »

As a research assistant in the Met’s Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, I spend much of my time working with details. I check facts, organize and record information in our files and collections database, proofread written materials, and perform a host of other nitty-gritty tasks related to our projects. Read more »

Welcome to the blog that accompanies “American Stories: Paintings from Everyday Life, 1765–1915,” the special exhibition now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show’s outstanding selection of more than one hundred American narrative paintings—assembled by curators H. Barbara Weinberg and Carrie Rebora Barratt—includes works that depict ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures. Because the exhibition is arranged chronologically, this blog will address some of the persistent themes—such as courtship, country and city life, and even consumer culture—that have captivated American artists across time. I will also discuss some of the behind-the-scenes aspects of planning the exhibition and will respond to your comments and questions. Read more »