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From images of farmers making cider to boys trapping rabbits, the pieces in the exhibition offer viewers insight into Mounts America, an understanding of the artists creative process and a sense of how his work both reflected and influenced popular culture in its day. Genre painting typically depicts ordinary social and domestic scenes and as such reflects and preserves the particular flavor of contemporary life. Mounts paintings were remarkable in their commonplace rural subjects and in the sometimes-controversial messages, themes and ideas expressed through canny use of imagery and detail. (Johnson) Most interesting about Mounts paintings, at least to a contemporary viewer, is their integrated cast of characters. Mount represents African Americans and whites together, singly and in groups. A trio of white men play music in a barn while a black man listens from outside. Together in a boat, a black woman and a white boy search for eels.
Mounts popular series of prints show cosmopolitan black musicians, playing banjo, violin or bones. Mounts pictures have been interpreted as an allegorical commentary on slavery - Mount was a Democrat, and felt that blacks were being used politically. An image of a boy in a theme of shatter tickling the ear of a dozing black field hand, for instance, is read as a parable about abolitionists (the cap was an abolitionist symbol) plying a naive listener with empty promises (ear tickling). It appears that these paintings suggest nostalgia for a time before abolition (slavery was ended in the North in the early 1800 s). Mounts family held slaves on Long Island, and his sentimental recollection of African Americans must come from his experience.
Johnson does not explicate the sources of Mounts style. Perhaps its not possible to explain the structural slyness of an artist who mixes strong political meanings into an art that appeals to sentiment - all sweetness and light and lost rural boyhood. Most of Johnsons references to Mounts intricately worked-out political allegories are footnoted to a work by Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (Yale University Press, 1991). Johns contributes a brief essay to the catalogue, Boys Will Be Boys: Notes on William Sidney Mounts Vision of Childhood. (Johnson) It would be pretty unbalanced not to mention the contemporaries of Mount in the representation of the history of the painting the images of rural life. With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, an era of democratization and equality swept America and with it a period of vast expansion of creativity in the arts. Landscape artists Thomas Doughty, Thomas Cole, Asher B.
Durand, Frederic Church, and George Incest strove to document the untouched look of the new Eden, blending their individual styles with the Old World romantic traditions of the sublime and the beautiful. It was the American landscapists who first captured the symbolic features of the new nation. Instead of ancient ruins, these painters found history in spectacular land and water formations and, especially, in the inclusion of Native Americans within their scenes. Unleashed waterfalls, soaring eagles, and other emblems of liberty came to represent the countrys image. (Frisbee)
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Research essay sample on Mounts Paintings Genre Painting Black
