Commerce and Agriculture Bringing Wealth to Detroit: A Mural by Thomas Wilmer Dewing

This 24-page catalogue, including illustrations in color and black and white is by Bailey Van Hook, associate professor of art and art history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia. Van Hook is the author of Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876-1914 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) and a forthcoming book on public mural painting in America, 1893-1914. The text provides an overview of Thomas Dewing's career and discusses the influences on the mural including James McNeill Whistler and the American mural movement. She details the commission of this important mural, which was installed in the Detroit Savings Bank in 1900, as well as the roles of the entrepreneur-collector Charles Lang Freer and of the prominent architect Stanford White. Van Hook's discussion of the mural's iconography, style, and critical reception reveals why this work is such a tour-de-force, encapsulating the ideals of the turn-of-the-century aesthetic era in America.