History of American Painting, Volume Two - The Light of Distant Skies 1760-1835

Most of the major painters in the two generations covered in this history spent time in Europe and attempted to link their native convictions with the European tradition. While the painters of the Revolutionary generation succeeded and became leaders in the evolution of European styles, the first painters of the new republic were artistically stifled by their attempts to base a native American tradition on European models. James Thomas Flexner unfolds this history with the ease of a historical novel. The individual characters and styles of each painter are carefully delineated: Benjamin West, who became president of England's Royal Academy; the versatile and irrepressible Charles Wilson Peale; the brooding Trumbull; the eccentric arch-Romantic Washington Allston; Morse, who in despair abandoned painting to invent the telegraph; the confident tailor-dyer-painter Francis Guy; and many others. Flexner also tells of the painters, from semi-sohisticate to primitive, who did not go to Europe - Audubon, Hicks and others. Includes 103 illustrations and an Index.