"This book is mind-blowing. Nemerov is a groundbreaking thinker in his field."—John Wilmerding, Princeton University "This is a book for all serious Americanists."—Jay Fliegelman, author of Declaring Independence "Each haunting and delicately wrought canvas expands as Nemerov writes about it, so that his interpretive work both mirrors and supplements the wondrous intensity of the paintings themselves."—Ellen Handler Spitz, Museums of the Mind "Underneath their apparent simplicity, Raphaelle Peale's still lifes glow mysteriously in the dark light of their making. Peale transformed the common items of the early-nineteenth-century kitchen and market into explorations of the American unconscious. Now, writing as coolly and lucidly as Peale painted, Alexander Nemerov has unpeeled those still lifes in a tour de force of formalistic analysis. Through close interrogation of these small, hermetic images, Nemerov's book reveals the whole world of early America, in the process bringing us as close as possible to the genius of Raphaelle Peale."—David C. Ward, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. "This is a dazzling study, lively and imaginative, of an important body of work. Nemerov's novel arguments regarding still life in general and Raphaelle Peale in particular reveal much about the art, the man, and the times. It is a thoughtful and provocative book, certain to generate interest and debate. "—Charles C. Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture, University of Kansas "A triumph of interpretation! Not since Michael Fried's groundbreaking account of Thomas Eakins has a critic so reimagined the very terms by which we see painting. Nemerov's account singlehandedly catapults a painter we had previously considered to be interesting, but minor, into the forefront of discussions about American art during the early National Period. The Body of Raphaelle Peale will no doubt spark the beginning of an exciting revival of scholarship in American Romantic painting."—Bryan J. Wolf, author of Romantic Re-Vision

The beautifully illustrated book, with 47 color plates, will restore Raphaelle Peale, eldest son of artist, naurtalist, and inventor Charles Willson Peale, to his rightful place in the annals of American art.

It links the artist's autobiography to his painting, illuminating the man, his art, and his times. Peale emerges for the first time as that particularly American phenomenon: the self-made man."

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

Early American painter Gilbert Stuart has long been mistakenly represented as a hard-drinking rogue, habitual liar, and inexplicable financial failure. To explain his stylistic unevenness as an artist, he is assumed to have had an inferior assistant, but the documentary evidence for an assistant who painted on his portraits is non-existent-in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. This ground-breaking study demonstrates that Stuart suffered from a hereditary form of manic depression, leading him to create pictures that contain peculiar lapses characteristic of a manic-depressive, or bipolar, artist. Using documentary and empirical evidence-from diaries and letters to x-radiographs of paintings-this book fills important gaps in our knowledge of Stuart, and connects the strange visual effects in some of Stuart's paintings with cognitive deficits attendant with the disorder. In addition to Stuart, other bipolar artists, including George Romney, Raphaelle Peale, Gilbert Stuart Newton, and William Rimmer, are discussed in relation to these deficits, revealing patterns which carry broader implications for all manic-depressive artists. This volume is a significant contribution not only to studies of Stuart and the four other painters but also to our understanding of the mind of a manic-depressive artist. It bridges the broad disciplines of art history and psychopathology.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion, physicality, and imagination. The book broadens to consider similar "animated" behaviors in seemingly disparate media—films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical My Fair Lady and the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes—drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.

Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sully's Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with his discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait's provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Receiving most attention are Thomas Lawrence and Sully, his American counterpart. The author gives the fullest account to date of Sully's career and his relation to English influences and to figures prominent in the early-nineteenth-century American imagination, among them, Washington, Fanny Kemble, Lafayette, Joseph Bonaparte, and Nicholas Biddle. Byron is discussed as an icon of the young American Republic whose Jubilee year coincided with Sully's initial work on the poet's portrait. Later chapters offer a close reading of the portrait, arguing that Sully has given a visual interpretation truly worthy of his celebrated, controversial, and famously handsome subject.

This set reissues 7 books on the Romantic poet Lord Byron originally published between 1957 and 2005. The volumes examine Byron’s poetry, his poetic development, and his social and private life. Lord Byron’s epic satiric poem Don Juan is examined by some of the leading scholars of Romanticism.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision. The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.