The American Pre-Raphaelites: An Egalitarian Ocularity [electronic resource].

9781088315187

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (437 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This dissertation argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites launched one of the earliest reform movements in the history of American art. Indicting both established aesthetic norms and the moral corruption they observed in the nation's politics, the painters, architects, scientists, and critics who comprised the American Pre-Raphaelites united during the Civil War to form the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. The output of the group's painters, primarily landscape scenes, nature studies, and still lifes, is not overtly occupied with issues such as manumission or war. Yet a close examination of their paintings reveals that these young artists shared the conviction that the idealized landscape scenes of the artists later labeled the "Hudson River School" failed to confront the institution of slavery, thereby effectively promoting a morally compromised vision of the American narrative. The group sought not only to dismantle national traditions of landscape painting by embracing models of landscape theory and artistic praxis drawn from the work of John Ruskin and the British Pre-Raphaelites, but also, I contend, to herald a comprehensive reformation of American architecture and criticism.This dissertation comprises four chapters: the first on painter William James Stillman, and the earliest stirrings of American Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1850s; the second on painter Thomas Charles Farrer, and the movement's commitment to what I term "egalitarian ocularity" in landscape painting; the third on the group's architects Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr., and their project of designing Gothic Revival structures in which Pre-Raphaelite painting and naturalistic sculptural carving converge; and the fourth on its scientists Clarence King and James Gardiner, their relationship with painter John Henry Hill, and their collaboration on the Fortieth Parallel Survey. Association members challenged long-standing conventions in landscape representation and architectural practice that shaped and regulated the viewer's experience. The radicalism of American Pre-Raphaelite painting lay in the violation of formulaic spatial relationships and the destabilization of the landscape genre induced by a hyperrealist style. Pre-Raphaelite architects, by contrast, could more palpably articulate the movement's reformist agenda by employing the materials, ornamentation, and redemptive semantic of the Gothic Revival. Within a half-decade, Association members had made their mark in multiple arenas of American culture beyond painting, including art collecting, exhibition design, public and private architectural commissions, nationally and internationally circulated newspapers and journals, and higher education. Considering these activities as part of a broad inter-artistic initiative reclaims the achievements of the American Pre-Raphaelites from the periphery of nineteenth-century culture and positions them at the center of key transatlantic discourses on art, pedagogy, and politics.

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English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. History of Art.