Training the Eye and the Hand: Drawing Books in 19th- Century America

Published in a variety of formats ranging from series of lessons printed on cards for children's use to sophisticated treatises on art and design, drawing books were readily available in nineteenth-century America through the public school system. Despite the proliferation of drawing books, the contribution of those texts to nineteenth-century visual culture has been largely unexplored by scholars of American art. The first part of the study traces the development of drawing books by examining how drawing books may have supplemented the early American academies of art and by considering the role of drawing in the nineteenth century as described in official education documents. The second part of the study considers the work of nineteenth-century landscape and figural artists, selected on the basis of their having some known connection with contemporary drawing books, and explores how the pedagogical methods they encountered in the drawing books may have influenced their works. The study primarily focuses on first and second generation Hudson River School landscape artists such as Thomas Cole, Archibald Robertson, John Rubens Smith, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and Fitz Hugh Lane, and on the works of William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Consideration is also given to ways in which drawing books were utilized by such "folk" artists as Joseph Whiting Stock and how works by artisans and women may have been influenced by contemporary American drawing books. The information disseminated by nineteenth-century drawing books essentially provided a range of available schemata, a term defining both the manual process of drawing or painting and the intellectual process of learning to see, which a broad spectrum of artists manipulated to their own aesthetic ends.