Image Gallery
Early Works on Paper
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At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, Americans of some financial means showed their pride in their success by sending their daughters to academies or finishing schools where the polite arts of needlework, music, dancing, writing, and watercolor painting—all intended to prepare young ladies for marriage—were major parts of the curriculum. At the same time, the Romantic movement, imported from England and France, was reaching American shores and meeting with great popularity. Accordingly, girls in school were encouraged to engage in sentimentality and the paintings they produced reflected the influence or Romanticism. Idealized pictures, moody moonlit landscapes, and romantic story paintings were painted at these schools in great numbers. Delicate watercolors showing landscapes filled with castles and ruins, mourning pictures, and both grisailled and brightly colored theorems were all part of this manifestation. There was also an interest in Biblical subjects and scenes taken from Classical mythology that resulted in pictures produced both in watercolor and needlework, most adapted from prints imported from Europe.
Religion has always been a major inspiration for the folk artist. In the Hudson Valley, Dutch settlers between New York City in the south and Albany in the north produced a body of religious art of great significance. They and their descendants adorned their walls with paintings based on illustrations in Bibles brought from the Netherlands. Many of these pictures have been shown to have been executed by the same artists who were also painting portraits of the local population.
Closely related is the fraktur tradition of the Pennsylvania Germans. Fraktur, a term that is broadly defined as illuminated manuscripts, is an art form that can be traced back to medieval Europe. Fraktur-schriften, “fraktur writing,” was one of the arts the German-speaking immigrants brought with them from the Old World. Almost every eighteenth-century group of German-speaking Protestants migrating to America included a minister or schoolmaster who was skilled in fraktur writing. To add to their incomes, these men and their successors prepared the certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, and death that had been required by law in Europe and continued to be made by tradition-loving Germans in their new home.
Birth and baptismal certificates (Taufscheine) are the most common. Vorschrift, a penmanship example—usually including a biblical passage or a hymn together with sample alphabets—prepared by a schoolmaster for his pupils to copy, is the next most numerous type. Other kinds of fraktur are “rewards of merit” drawn by teachers for diligent students, bookplates and illustrations for hymnals, house blessings, and other presentation pieces.
Schools in Pennsylvania continued to teach fraktur writing until the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, the establishment of the English school system and the wide availability of inexpensive, mass-produced certificates designed to be colored and filled in at home, led to the disappearance of this art form.
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, Americans of some financial means showed their pride in their success by sending their daughters to academies or finishing schools where the polite arts of needlework, music, dancing, writing, and watercolor painting—all intended to prepare young ladies for marriage—were major parts of the curriculum. At the same time, the Romantic movement, imported from England and France, was reaching American shores and meeting with great popularity. Accordingly, girls in school were encouraged to engage in sentimentality and the paintings they produced reflected the influence or Romanticism. Idealized pictures, moody moonlit landscapes, and romantic story paintings were painted at these schools in great numbers. Delicate watercolors showing landscapes filled with castles and ruins, mourning pictures, and both grisailled and brightly colored theorems were all part of this manifestation. There was also an interest in Biblical subjects and scenes taken from Classical mythology that resulted in pictures produced both in watercolor and needlework, most adapted from prints imported from Europe.
Religion has always been a major inspiration for the folk artist. In the Hudson Valley, Dutch settlers between New York City in the south and Albany in the north produced a body of religious art of great significance. They and their descendants adorned their walls with paintings based on illustrations in Bibles brought from the Netherlands. Many of these pictures have been shown to have been executed by the same artists who were also painting portraits of the local population.
Closely related is the fraktur tradition of the Pennsylvania Germans. Fraktur, a term that is broadly defined as illuminated manuscripts, is an art form that can be traced back to medieval Europe. Fraktur-schriften, “fraktur writing,” was one of the arts the German-speaking immigrants brought with them from the Old World. Almost every eighteenth-century group of German-speaking Protestants migrating to America included a minister or schoolmaster who was skilled in fraktur writing. To add to their incomes, these men and their successors prepared the certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, and death that had been required by law in Europe and continued to be made by tradition-loving Germans in their new home.
Birth and baptismal certificates (Taufscheine) are the most common. Vorschrift, a penmanship example—usually including a biblical passage or a hymn together with sample alphabets—prepared by a schoolmaster for his pupils to copy, is the next most numerous type. Other kinds of fraktur are “rewards of merit” drawn by teachers for diligent students, bookplates and illustrations for hymnals, house blessings, and other presentation pieces.
Schools in Pennsylvania continued to teach fraktur writing until the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, the establishment of the English school system and the wide availability of inexpensive, mass-produced certificates designed to be colored and filled in at home, led to the disappearance of this art form.