Early American Art
From WikiDemocracy
Visual Art of the United States
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White (1540-c. 1593) the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Early American Art
The museum’s collection begins with works from the colonies of New Spain and New England. Some of the oldest works in the collection are from seventheenth-century Puerto Rico—Santa Bárbara (Saint Barbara), a painting from about 1680–90, and Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows), a painted wood sculpture from about 1675–1725. The collection features artworks that trace the transformation of the thirteen colonies into a nation, including portraits by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart; landscapes by Thomas Cole; and sculptures by Horatio Greenough.
Art in American Colonies and the United States, c. 1700–1865
It was only in 1605 the the British founded Roanoke Colony in what would later be named North Carolina. Although Roanoke Colony failed while still in its infancy, two years later the British colony of Jamestown—founded in 1607—managed, despite starvation and disease, to survive. It is estimated that the combined European population of North America in 1610 was approximately 350. In contrast to this, a recent study has suggested that the population of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States and Canada approached 7 million—a number that was greatly reduced in the decades following the arrival of Europeans due to genocide and the introduction of pathogens from Europe, Asia, and Africa to which the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had no protection.
Art of the Americas
The Art of the Americas department studies, presents, and cares for the paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts made throughout North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean by artists from many cultures and nations. Spanning 3,000 years, from the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica to the modern art capitals of Mexico City and New York, these objects embody the essential human desire to create meaning and beauty through art and craft, a drive shared by artists free and enslaved, trained and self-taught, immigrant and indigenous. Shaped by global contexts of migration, war, commerce, politics, and cultural exchange, the works on view hold many stories and reflect a wide range of ideas about the Americas and Americanness—as a place, an identity, and an aspiration.
In Focus: Early American Art
by Farnsworth Art Museum 19/7/25
In Focus: Early American Art invites visitors to delve into the Museum’s exceptional holdings of American art from the 18th to early 20th century. Featuring both iconic pieces and recent acquisitions, the show offers a fresh perspective on American art history. Through portraits, landscapes, and Wabanaki baskets, the exhibition broadens our understanding of the country’s cultural heritage, artistic legacy and Maine’s role within it.
American Folk Art Museum is a center of scholarship
Ancient American Art in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing
A rich history of creative expression—parallel to, but independent of, the rest of the world—unfolded in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean thousands of years prior to European colonization. Over the course of several millennia, artists transformed select materials into monumental stone sculptures, finely crafted gold ornaments, and other works in wood, ceramic, shell, textile, and featherwork. The Met’s collection of ancient American art sheds light on how these works were commissioned, created, and animated by powerful men and women across the continents.
Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North
Through 125 remarkable works including paintings, needlework, and photographs, this exhibition invites visitors to focus on figures who appear in—or are omitted from—early American images and will challenge conventional narratives that have minimized early Black histories in the North, revealing the complexities and contradictions of the region’s history between the late 1600s and early 1800s.
New Galleries Will Present a Fresh Take on Art of the Americas with a Focus on Philadelphia
by PHILADEPHIA ART MUSEUM 25/2/21
On May 7, 2021, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art unveils its new Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Galleries dedicated to American art from 1650 to1850, visitors will enter a succession of generously proportioned spaces to experience the museum’s spectacular collection of early American art in an entirely new light. In galleries that will be accessed from a spacious corridor that provides superb views to the city skyline through windows with Tiffany iron grilles—original to the building but blocked for many decades—visitors will be presented with the first major reinstallation of early American art since the nation’s Bicentennial celebrations in 1976.
Early American Painting
Early American art includes works made by settlers in what we now know as the United States. Before the American Revolution, artists documented life in the colonies of New Spain and New England. And in the early decades of the United States, many artists represented the new nation through portraits of its early leaders.
List of American artists before 1900
This is a list by date of birth of historically recognized American fine artists known for the creation of artworks that are primarily visual in nature, including traditional media such as painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking.
Ten Artworks to Understand Early United States History
From the Native peoples lobbying to keep their homelands to immigrants facing challenges in their new home, artists used these works to shape American identity, advocate for change, and reckon with our nation’s stories.
American Paintings and Sculpture
by YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
Yale University has been collecting American art for more than 250 years. In 1832 it erected the first art museum on a college campus in North America, with the intention of housing John Trumbull’s paintings of the American Revolution—including his iconic painting The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776—and close to 100 of his portraits of Revolutionary and Early Republic worthies.
Foundations of American Art
Spanning from the 18th century to the mid-20th century, the newly installed Foundations of American Art gallery—the first fully transformed gallery in our expansion—offers an engaging and immersive journey through the early and modern chapters of our shared cultural story.
At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism
by Whitney Museum of American Art 7/5/22
At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism showcases art produced between 1900 and 1930 by well-known American modernists and their now largely forgotten, but equally groundbreaking peers. Drawn primarily from the Whitney’s permanent collection, it provides new perspectives on the myriad ways American artists used nonrepresentational styles developed in Europe to express their subjective responses to the realities of the modern age.
The first newly-transformed gallery highlights artists and stories from the 18th to early 20th centuries
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art reaches a major milestone in its expansion on Saturday, July 19, when the museum’s first newly-transformed gallery opens to the public. The Foundations of American Art Gallery is located in the former Contemporary space and features works many visitors may remember from the Early American collection, like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 and Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico, as well as several new works that will surprise, delight, and inspire guests. The installation highlights artists and stories from the 18th to early 20th centuries, connecting the past with the present.
American Made: Selections from The Huntington’s Early American Art Collections Exhibitions
The American art collections are growing, and the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art are expanding to make room for new acquisitions and to improve the visitor experience. While several rooms are closed this fall during renovations, curators have taken the opportunity to spotlight some of the earliest works in the collection in a temporary installation in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. “American Made: Selections from The Huntington’s Early American Art Collections” opens Sept. 5 and continues through Jan. 5, 2016, focusing on masterworks from the colonial period through the Civil War.
The Art of Early American Embroidery
From the 1600s until about 1830, the education of American girls emphasized reading, writing, and embroidery. For girls whose families could afford to send them to school, a finely worked embroidery which was worthy of being framed for display in her home served as a kind of diploma. It evidenced both her mastery of an important practical skill and the diligence and self-discipline that society expected of its more privileged members.
EARLY AMERICAN PAINTER
My name is Suzanne Carroll Korn. I am an early American painter, folk artist, and owner of Grace for Daisy Folkart! I'm so happy you found my website. My inspiration leaps from the folk art landscapes, designs, and motifs found on New England’s 19th century historic paint-decorated walls. Over 20 years ago, I began researching, studying, and writing about these large and amazing remnants of American folk art that were painted between the years 1800 – 1860.
American Decorative Arts
The American collection of decorative arts contain examples of furniture, sculpture, textiles, glass, ceramic, and metalwork from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The collection includes tools, portraits, landscapes, quilts, chairs, and rare examples of exuberantly painted furniture that come primarily from rural New England.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
by Smithsonian American Art Museum
The nation’s first collection of American art offers an unparalleled record of the American experience, capturing the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world, including works by such stylistically diverse luminaries as John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The museum shares its magnificent National Historic Landmark building with the National Portrait Gallery.
American art collection
Portraiture is central to this collection and includes the oldest known self-portrait by an American artist, Thomas Smith, as well as the oldest American portrait paintings, by the Freake-Gibbs Painter. The collection has over 100 objects of Paul Revere silver and significant examples of 19th-century and early 20th-century American paintings with works by Edward Mitchell Bannister, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent.
Early American Galleries
Trace the origins of our city’s extraordinary creativity in our new Early American Art galleries. The 10,000-square-foot space has been installed to tell the story of how Philadelphia became the young nation’s cultural capital, and how Black, Indigenous, and Latin American artists contributed to the development of American art.
The American Wing
Visitors to the American Wing will experience in more than 75 galleries on three floors varied art, design, and culture from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, with some contemporary expressions, by a diverse array of artists from across North America. Since our founding in 1924, this curatorial department has evolved its collecting to include some 20,000 artworks in many mediums by African American, Asian American, Euro-American, Latin American, and Native American makers, affirming ever more inclusive definitions of American art and identity.
American Painting and Sculpture
by THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
The American holdings at the Cleveland Museum of Art rank among the finest anywhere. One year prior to its opening to the public in 1916, the museum purchased its first painting, John Singleton Copley’s portrait Catherine Greene, thereby launching a commitment to collecting superior examples of American art. Since then, the museum has acquired nearly 300 American paintings and approximately 90 sculptures, constituting an excellent survey from around 1750 to 1960. The museum’s historic preference for quality over quantity—a philosophy devoted to acquiring a small number of major works by important artists—has kept the collection particularly well balanced and concise.
ART & ARTISTS
by Whitney Museum of American Art
Early American Landscape
Early American Craft Fair
All the proceeds will benefit Historic Trappe, a non-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share historic places, landscapes, and heritage of southeastern Pennsylvania. Historic Trappe proudly supports traditional artisans throughout the year in its museum store and exhibits fine Americana and folk art in its museums.
Unfolding Metamorphosis, or the Early American Tactile Image
by THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS
This article uncovers the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century media genre of the “tactile image,” pictures designed to engage hand and eye in tandem. In 1787, a lift-the-flap engraving known as the Metamorphosis was published in Philadelphia, and it quickly multiplied in print and manuscript form. Designed by schoolteacher Benjamin Sands, the flap book’s focused choreography of vision and touch both emerged from and contributed to a period discourse of hands-on pedagogy. Reconstructing the Metamorphosis’s collisions with practices ranging from sampler embroidery to trompe l’oeil painting, I contend that the tactile image makes visible an early national conceptual framework of sensory observation and discernment that reached far beyond the classroom.
The Hudson River School and the Lure of the West
The museum’s collection charts the nation’s growth from a young republic to an emerging world power. Landscapes extolling the nation’s geographic wonders from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon drove and documented westward expansion. Asher Durand’s painting Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York presents an idyllic landscape where man and nature coexist.
Smithsonian American Art Museum Acquires Extraordinary Early Photography Collection From Larry J. West
by News Release 17/8/21 Smithsonian
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has acquired a collection of objects related to early American photography from the collector Larry J. West that transforms the museum’s photography holdings. The L.J. West Collection includes 286 objects from the 1840s to about 1925 in three groupings: works by early African American daguerreotypists James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge and Augustus Washington; early photographs of diverse portrait subjects and objects related to abolitionists, the Underground Railroad and the role of women entrepreneurs in it; and photographic jewelry that represents the bridge between miniature painting and early cased photography such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes.
Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery
by DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS 13/12/24
This exhibition juxtaposes a large group of embroideries made by American girls and young women between 1740 and 1830, with contemporary embroideries by Elaine Reichek, revealing changing attitudes toward gender, race and class.
American Art
American painting is the focus of the Georgia Museum of Art’s collection of American art, which began with a donation of 100 American paintings by the museum’s founder. Nineteenth-century works include those by George Cooke, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam and Frederick Frieseke.
American Women Artists: 1830-1930
NMWA opened officially on April 7, 1987, with the premiere of a major exhibition titled American Women Artists, 1830-1930. Assembled by distinguished scholar and lecturer Dr. Eleanor M. Tufts, the inaugural exhibition featured 124 paintings and sculptures created by American women artists during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Art History Lecture Series: American Art from The Revolution to 1850
This series explores the rise of American art history from the country’s founding into the early 19th century. Topics include landscape and genre painting, as well as the emerging generation of new artists who captured the spirit of young America and helped establish the nation’s developing cultural identity.
Welcome to First Americans Museum
In one place, visitors experience the collective histories of 39 distinctive First American Nations in Oklahoma today. The 175,000 square foot museum, located in Oklahoma City’s new Horizons District, showcases state-of-the-art exhibitions in First American history, community events and educational programs, a restaurant and café offering unique Indigenous-inspired cuisine, a multi-purpose theater and a museum store featuring exclusive items created by premiere First American artists.
American Art Galleries
by YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
The Yale University Art Gallery’s American paintings and sculpture collection was reinstalled in summer 2017, refreshing the presentation of the Gallery’s renowned collection of American fine art from the colonial period to the early 20th century. The new layouts of the Richard and Jane Manoogian Foundation Galleries of American Art before 1900 and the Mary Jo and Ted Shen Gallery have reoriented the story of American art for our visitors, and the display was also conceived with the flexibility to integrate rotations of light-sensitive artworks that showcase the richness and depth of the Gallery’s collection. We hope that you will come, enjoy, rediscover old favorites, and find some new ones.
Dancing in the Flames
by Jennifer Van Horn THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS
This essay investigates a pair of early American andirons that depict identical African figures, each holding a decanter and wine glass. Manufactured by enslaved laborers at an unidentified iron foundry, the andirons depict Black bodies laboring in service. The andirons resemble contemporary representations of enslaved attendants serving White subjects in portraits, as well as woodblock-printed figures that decorated newspaper advertisements for slave auctions. Yet because of their materiality, they complicated the fantasies these visual artifacts proclaim.
The New Early American Art Galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Investigating and Interpreting Art Objects' "Original Effects"
After a two-year hiatus due to the Covid 19 pandemic, the Mellon-funded Penn/PMA object study workshops resumed in fall 2021 with a session focused on the newly installed Early American Art galleries at the PMA. A morning meeting was devoted to background presentations via Zoom followed by afternoon in-person discussions in the galleries.
Virginia Steele Scott Galleries
While Henry E. Huntington envisioned a collection of American art as early as 1919, his vision was not realized until 60 years later. In 1979, the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation made a major gift to The Huntington in memory of Virginia Steele Scott, an art collector, patron, and philanthropist. The gift included a group of 50 American paintings, funds to construct a gallery to display the collection, and an endowment for its professional management.
Early American Portraits
This user gallery has been created by an independent third party and may not represent the views of the institutions whose collections include the featured works or of Google Arts & Culture.
