Men Making Meaning in 19th-Century American Genre Painting, 1860- 1900

This dissertation explores the lives and work of the four most popular genre painters of the second half of the nineteenth century--John George Brown, Thomas Waterman Wood, Eastman Johnson, and Seymour Guy--in order to establish that these artists were not simply reflecting daily American life in genre painting but were reinforcing a value system maintained by a middle-class, urban, male segment of the population. Genre paintings functioned to promote a way of life desired by a socially mobile public, and the genre painter served as a teacher whose lesson was social hegemony.
Using social art history, biographical analysis, structuralism and deconstruction, I re-position the selectivity, reproducibility, sentimentality, and repetition of genre painting as positive attributes responsible for genre's success in both artistic and popular culture contexts. As evidence, I use works of art, art institutions, popular prints, contemporary criticism, and the lives of the artists and their collectors.
I shape my discussion around selected paintings by Johnson, Brown, Guy and Wood. After defining sentiment as expressed by male artists, I analyze the themes and subjects painted and repeated by genre painters. These reveal both what genre painters valorized and what they chose to ignore in their society. I relate the formal structures and devices utilized by the artists to verbal methods of communication. I also investigate the influence of the academic system as a means to promote genre and to reinforce the structures, themes and ways of life depicted on the canvas. I then explore which paintings genre's patrons collected and why they made their choices. How genre paintings fit into larger collections of images has important implications about the uses of genre in shaping the collector's presentation of self and, by extension, the culture's identity.
The dissertation concludes with an examination of the demise of genre painting as an active artistic vocabulary--or consensus narrative. For over 40 years, genre painters communicated successfully with a sympathetic audience. By looking at both the flowering and failure of genre painting, I hope to demonstrate the unsuspected complexity of genre's place in later nineteenth-century American culture.