This volume is devoted to the American naive paintings in the National Gallery of Art, which has one of the most important collections of this kind in the world. Created outside the academic mainstream, these paintings show an extraordinary diversity of individual expression and serve as vivid documents of American culture. Most of the works formerly belonged to the collection of Colonel Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, who donated more than 300 paintings and about 100 drawings to the Gallery over nearly thirty years. Most date from the nineteenth century and a substantial number are by well-known folk artists, including Erastus Salisbury Field, Ammi Phillips, and William Matthew Prior. The breadth and depth of the collection is such that it is possible, in several cases, to trace the progress of an individual artist's style. Although the majority of works came to the Gallery without identification, through painstaking research it has been possible to make attributions, which are published here for the first time. Many of the works in the Gallery's collection of American naive paintings are reproduced here in color. The extensive catalogue provides a full history of the objects and artists, with technical notes as well as biographical and bibliographical information.

This book presents watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts in the Index of American Design, a visual archive of decorative, folk, and popular arts made in America from the colonial period to about 1900. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States.

Includes 2 paintings and a discussion of the origins of naive painting prior to the 1890s.

Contains one hundred illustrations representing the most significant aspects of the folk art tradition, with extensive footnotes and a biographical index of the major artists.