Depicting characters like the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson and spaces like the crowded galleries in The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this book, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of The Morgan Library &amp; Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.
The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the novelist’s artistic and social milieu. They show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanors and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably about the work of his friend Sargent.
A refreshing new perspective on a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, Henry James and American Painting reveals a James whose literary imagination, in Tóibín’s words, “seemed most at ease with the image” and the work of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.

Henry James and American Painting (Penn State Series in the History of the Book)

Arts & Photography

Simpson, Marc

Kiely, Declan

TOIBIN, COLM.

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Paint should not be applied thick,” James McNeill Whistler once famously stated. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” Through an innovative manner of handling paint, a group of American artists around 1900 created deceptively simple canvases that convey images of shimmering transience, visions suggested rather than delineated. Focusing on this singular aesthetic characteristicsoftnessLike Breath on Glass explores this painterly phenomenon through works by fifteen important artists, including Whistler, George Inness, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Twachtman, and Edward Steichen.
Leading scholars in American art consider a wide variety of topics: the very different motivestechnical, social, religious, and scientificthat prompted these artists in their experimentation; their materials; their techniques for creating the appearance of effortlessness; period notions of the vague” through art and writing; and the revival of "painting softly" in the 1950s and 1960s. This beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated catalogue highlights a surprisingly understudied yet important aspect of American cultural and painterly achievement.

Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly

Clark Art Institute

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is one of the core figures of 19th-century American art. While most well-known for his oil paintings of Civil War scenes and the windswept Atlantic coastline, Homer’s oeuvre encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from childhood games through the life-and-death struggles of man and nature. The Clark Art Institute holds one of the greatest collections of Homer’s work across all media, including wood engravings, etchings, watercolors, drawings, and paintings from nearly all phases of his career. The collection was assembled predominately by Robert Sterling Clark (1877–1956), who purchased his first Winslow Homer painting in 1915, followed by Two Guides in 1916 and maintained a passion for the artist throughout the rest of his collecting career, acquiring the small oil Playing a Fish in 1955.
This book examines Robert Sterling Clark as a collector of Homer and the Clark’s extensive holdings of the artist. Over thirty entries discuss the role of individual works in Homer's oeuvre and their larger significance to the art world. An illustrated checklist provides information on titles, dates, and media for the entire collection.

Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection

Demy folio, [27.75cm/11in], paperbound with pictorial covers, pp. 223. Fully illustrated with color plates

Expressions of Place

Mills, Sally

Henderson, Andrea

Fine Arts Museum San Francisco

Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent

By the time John Singer Sargent turned thirty, years old in 1886, he already commanded an international reputation in the art world, creating a stream of works for exhibition that people eagerly awaited and discussed at length. Henry, James noted that Sargent's talent offered "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle" of an artist on the threshold of his career who in fact had nothing more to learn. This book explores how the young American painter in just over a decade jumped from apprenticeship to wide acclaim, how he presented himself and his works, and how he sought to shape public perception of his talent. The book includes illustrations of every painting Sargent exhibited in Paris, London, and New York through 1887.
Drawing on the correspondence of the artist, his friends, and his family, as well as an extensive review of contemporary critical responses, the text examines these works of Sargent's early maturity -- some unseen in this century and others among his best-known works, including Smoke of Ambergris and Madame X. The authors contend that the canvases present a fresh view of Sargent's aspirations and ambitions, representing a metaphoric self-portrait of the artist as a young man. The early paintings, their relationship to one another, and their reception also shed light on the complex, cosmopolitan art world in which Sargent lived.
Uncanny Spectacle accompanies an exhibition of John Singer Sargent's early paintings that will open in June 1997 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Weinberg, H. Barbara

Sargent, John Singer

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Ormond, Richard

Individual Artists

Clark Art Inst

Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute / Dist. by Yale University Press

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Museum

Gives background information and artist profiles for a hundred representative paintings

The American Canvas: Paintings from the Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Saville, Jennifer

History

Hudson Hills Pr

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