American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

Resources like Google Images and the Met’s Collection Database provide instant access to images of a vast array of objects. But before photography—not to mention the Internet—audiences relied on prints to see images of contemporary and historical works of art. In fact, many of the paintings in American Stories also exist as prints, sometimes in thousands of impressions. In today’s post, I’ll consider how some of the works in the exhibition entered into the broader consciousness through a variety of printed forms. 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 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 »