“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.”

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

One of the most difficult challenges in a United States history survey course is integrating art and cultural themes. At Providence Day School, where we teach, history teachers are lucky. There is a lot of cooperation and cross-pollination between the history department and the visual arts department. Chris Wallace, the chair of the visual arts department, is part of the team that teaches our elective on the 1960s, and he also works with the teachers in many other courses, both as a guest lecturer and a facilitator for the integration of art into their curriculum. We have been working for three years on integrating more American art into the curriculum of the Advanced Placement and regular United States history courses. We have explored ways for the students to truly interact with the art, rather than the traditional “art in the dark” day of slides. In this lesson, students interact with the art of the Gilded Age and learn about the artists as a way of reviewing the major themes of the unit prior to assessment.

Time Frame

This lesson is intended for one forty-five-minute class period, with preview and follow-up assignments. Teachers could also allow one library research day for preparation. It could easily take two class periods or fill a ninety-minute block.

Student Objectives

Background

At our school, the unit on the Gilded Age covers a number of themes (we call them the “tions”): industrialization and concentration in industry (including the maldistribution of wealth and the philosophies justifying it), consumer consumption, westward expansion, mechanization in agriculture and industry, invention and technological innovation, organization of labor, urbanization and pollution, immigration, evolution of the political culture (corruption?), and two ongoing issues—race relations and women’s rights. The way U.S. history is usually periodized, Reconstruction is taught and tested prior to the Gilded Age, so we have to keep reminding the students that certain events we previously studied overlap with the Gilded Age.

Throughout the year, our students learn a four-step process for looking at paintings and other works of art:

1. Style or approach: i.e., realistic, abstract, non-objective.
2. Subject matter or concept: what the artist is trying to convey in terms of the idea. Is it recognizable?
3. Composition: arrangement of the images, focal point(s), use of positive and negative (inactive, background) spaces.
4. Technique: how the paint is applied, color relationships, use of light and dark, how light strikes the subject of the painting, use of texture (tactile or visual, use of depth). Does the artist convince the viewer that he/she is looking at something three-dimensional in the painting?

Although this lesson concentrates on steps 1 and 2, it may include aspects of steps 3 and 4, especially in one of the extension activities.

Procedure

Teacher Notes

If you have more than twenty students, you could use any of the following artists.

Architects:
McKim, Mead, and White—Boston Public Library
William Le Baron Jenney—Home Insurance Building
Daniel Burnham—Reliance Building

Sculptors:
John Quincy Adams Ward—Garfield Memorial

Painters:
Eastman Johnson—In the Fields
George Inness—Delaware Water Gap
William Merritt Chase—Idle Hours
Childe Hassam—Union Square in Spring

Photographers:
Eadweard Muybridge—photos of humans and animals in motion
You could also assign someone to look at Victorian interior decoration.

Another option for this assignment would be to assign some students literary figures. The advantage of this is that you can include important authors in your review of the unit. The (big) disadvantage is that the students will not have time to confront the art itself, but rather will rely on sources such as Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature or The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Authors could include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Edward Bellamy, Frank Norris, Horatio Alger, among others.

A better option would be to assign poets and to tell these students to include three to five poems or excerpts from different poems. Possible poets include Paul Laurence Dunbar (We Wear the Mask) and Walt Whitman.

Extension Activities

Sources

The two books we have found most useful for researching American art are Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture (Madison, WI: Brown and Benchmark, 1994); and Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997). Both of these are also excellent sources for biographical details, artistic interpretations, and images. Abraham A. Davidson, The Story of American Painting (New York: Harry Abrams, 1974); and Edward Lucie-Smith, American Realism (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994) are also good sources for both images and information. This idea for comparing student interpretations to a historian’s interpretation was inspired by Roberta Leach and Augustine Caliguire,“Lesson 34: Arts in the Gilded Age,” in Advanced Placement U.S. History 1 (Rocky River, OH: The Center for Learning, 1997). Richard McLanathan, Art in America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973) is a useful short interpretation of American art. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York: Dover Paperback, 1955) is the classic study of Gilded-Age arts and is still very interesting to read.

Ted Dickson is the chair of the history department at Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina. He serves as an Advanced Placement U.S. history reader and has presented a number of Focus on Teaching sessions at annual meetings of the OAH. His original interest in this subject stems from his experience as a teaching assistant for Professor Harold Kirker at the University of California, Santa Barbara. When Professor Kirker retired, he gave Mr. Dickson many of his slides, and Professor Kirker’s example inspired him to find ways to incorporate art into the teaching of history.

Chris Wallace is the chair of the visual arts department at Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Handout 1: Our Gilded-Age Art Museum

Your assignment is to create a poster exhibit for our class art museum. Your poster should describe the work of a particular Gilded-Age artist, who will be assigned by the teacher from the list included in this handout.

Your poster should contain the following information:

1. The artist’s name.
2. Three to five images of the artist’s work.
   
   1. You may photocopy your images out of art books, or print them off of your computer, etc.
   2. Next to your artist’s name are a few suggestions for images you may want to include.
   3. When choosing your images, consider both the themes of the Gilded Age and the range of the artist’s work.
   4. You may also want to include quotes from the artist about the images or art in general.
      
3. A brief biography of the artist (including birth and death dates).
4. An attempt to relate the artist’s work to previous influences, artists, and themes.
5. An attempt to relate the artist’s work to the themes of the Gilded Age.
6. NOTE: You will receive Extra Credit if you relate the artist’s influence on later artists.

Your poster must be ready for class on:

List of Artists

Architects, and Engineers:
Richard Morris Hunt—The Breakers, the Biltmore House
Henry Hobson Richardson—Marshall Field Store
Louis Sullivan—Wainwright Building, Buffalo Guaranty Building
John and Washington Roebling—The Brooklyn Bridge
Frederick Law Olmstead—Central Park

Sculptors:
Augustus Saint-Gaudens—Shaw Memorial
Daniel Chester French—Minute Man
Frederic Remington—consider both his paintings and his bronzes

Painters:
John Singer Sargent—Madame X, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps
James McNeill Whistler—Study in Grey and Black
Mary Cassatt—The Boating Party
Thomas Eakins—Max Schmitt in a Single Scull and The Gross Clinic
Winslow Homer—The Veteran in a New Field and The Gulf Stream
John Peto—Reminiscences of 1865
William Harnett—After the Hunt
Henry Ossawa Tanner—The Banjo Lesson
Albert Pinkham Ryder—marine paintings

Photographers:
Jacob Riis—photos of urban life
Timothy O’Sullivan—photos of the West
William Henry Jackson—photos of the West

The Art Museum Activity

On ____________ we will hang the poster exhibits around the room, creating our own art museum. Once we have created the museum, your task will be to:

1. Browse through the Art Museum and study each artist and image carefully.
2. Record in your notebook:
   
   1. Key information about each artist and his/her work,
   2. Which themes or events of the Gilded Age the image represents (stretch your mind!), and
   3. Which interpretation of the art of the Gilded Age best fits each artist and his/her work.
      
3. Prepare for the homework assignment: pick the image that you think best represents the most important themes of the time period and write a paragraph explaining your choice in depth.

Handout 2: Interpretations of Art in the Gilded Age

I. American Renaissance and American Realism
The American Renaissance in art and architecture refers to the era from about 1885 to 1920. It was a spirit that was less nationalistic, and more associated with European culture, particularly that of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. American millionaires saw themselves as the modern-day counterparts of European aristocracy, and wished to live in homes that resembled sixteenth-century palaces of Italian princes or seventeenth-century chateaux of French nobility. They wanted their clubs, libraries, train stations, and art museums to express a rebirth of the grandeur of European golden ages past. J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick built a library and a mansion in New York City in the neo-Renaissance style. They filled them not with works by American artists, but with Old World masterpieces from the Middle Ages to the Baroque....The American Renaissance was the mantle of culture that cloaked American materialism, industrialism, capitalism, and even imperialism....

In the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the continuing cultural tug-of-war between the powerful allure of Europe and a fierce American chauvinism is evident in both literature and painting....[M]any American authors and painters [went] to the Old World to find training, inspiration, and even subject matter....

Not all Americans, however, were so totally committed to the cosmopolitan form of art, for a pro-American sentiment was actually very strong. It is useful to look at this more closely, especially in its literary manifestations....

Realism became a potent force in American literature....

Source: Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture, (Madison, WI: Brown and Benchmark, 1994), 287, 329.

II. The War and the Machine

American culture after 1860 was dominated by two vast images, as well as that of Nature. One was the Civil War. The other was the Machine. They were strongly linked.

The Civil War was the world’s first great modern war, total war, fought at the limits of an expanding technology of railroads, breechloaders, repeating guns, and ironclads. It was America’s Iliad, and its Holocaust as well.

It seemed to run on its own, a thing with its own will, swallowing the men in blue and gray as a furnace swallows coal....

The war encouraged, in some artists and writers and in much of their audience, a desire to face unpleasant facts: not so much out of morbidity (though there was a strain of that) as from a sense of obligation not to flinch from atrocious realities.... [D]uring and immediately after it, there was no escaping its reality, which transmitted itself through a vastly expanded press to a public eager for the latest victory or in dread of the newest disaster: the journalistic eye replaced that of the novelist or the poet, as the camera replaced that of the painter, as the conduit of unbearable reality....Of course a distinct visual ethic was bound to rise from American utilitarianism and materialism. It showed itself, earliest and most dramatically, in the area where science, material, and common social needs most visibly came together: architecture.

Source: Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 271-73.

Questions to Consider