American Marine Painting

WHEN John Wilmerding published his history of American marine painting in 1968, there was no book that surveyed the wealth of American art depicting the sea and the shore-views of shorelines, harbors, and the open sea, of nautical events, from naval battles to shipwrecks, and of vessels of all kinds, from yachts to clipper ships. Since then, the rediscovery that Wilmerding’s pioneering work helped to inspire of a little-known world of nineteenth-century American art and artists has continued. Artists who were virtually unheard-of by all but a few specialists in the field twenty years ago are now acknowledged as masters.

American Marine Painting (Second Edition) is appropriately a celebratory volume, and it includes more than sixty new colorplates than the first edition…. Wilmerding tells the story of American marine painting from the colonial period to the present, grouping artists by their styles and setting their work in historical context and adding artists whose work has been rediscovered since the book was first published.

After describing the colonial origins of American marine painting and the contributions of early folk artists, he launches into the mid-nineteenth century, the golden age of American marine painting.

He opens with a discussion of the artists of the Hudson River School, particularly Frederic Edwin Church, whose great marines offer the first of the book’s many revelations. The author carefully unravels the threads of European influence on American marines at a time when many important artists were emigrating to America, among them Michele Felice Come, Thomas Birch, Thomas Buttersworth, and Robert Salmon.

The first great achievements of an American painter whose subjects are exclusively marines belong to Fitz Hugh Lane, and Wilmerding devotes two chapters and many glorious colorplates to Lane and his followers.
Contents:
— The contribution of portrait painting
— The folk art tradition
— The contribution of history painting
— The Hudson River School: first generation
— The Hudson River School: second generation
— The inheritance of French Romantic painting
— The Dutch marine tradition
— English-American artists
— Independents
— The establishing of a style
— The style established
— Wind, sail, and steam
— The great age
— Toward new directions

Second Edition 1987

Hardback : 207 pages

Author : John Wilmerding

SKU: P0192