Gilded Age, a summary

Wealthy industrialists eager to acquire culture began to patronize native artists who had achieved international recognition. John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux created portraits of these new patrons, while John LaFarge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens made luxurious adornments for their homes. One group of painters - including Louis Comfort Tiffany, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner - responded especially to the fascination with exotic mid-eastern, Egyptian or "Oriental" cultures that characterized this age of international imperialism. The educated and refined aspect of Gilded Age culture is expressed in Renaissance-inspired paintings by Abbott Handerson Thayer and Mary Cassatt. Romantic literary works by visionary Albert Pinkham Ryder symbolize the idealized strivings of this generation, while the rugged landscapes of Winslow Homer emblemize the struggle and conflict that marked this period of contending social and industrial forces.

The phrase "the Gilded Age" arose from the title of a 1873 popular novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner about America's "golden road to fortune" that contrasted shallow materialism with the golden age of Greece. The period from the 1870s to World War I became identified as the Gilded Age. Throughout the era the United States was on the rise to power and taking a place on the international stage politically, economically, and culturally. Against this backdrop a new and important collaboration developed between wealthy American patrons and artists, based on European Renaissance ideals.

"Great ambition characterized this period in America," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Artists and patrons rose to new heights, as the 1876 Centennial engendered a strong sense of national pride and eagerness to match Europe's aristocracies." (Broun is a KU alumna and former acting director of the Spencer Museum.)

A heightened sophistication permeates the portraits in the exhibition. Society portraitist John Singer Sargent posed "Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler" (1893), (see left) whose family was heir to John Jacob Astor's fortune, flanked by old-master paintings. Cecilia Beaux portrayed her brother-in-law Henry Sturgis Drinker, a hard-driving corporate railroad lawyer, as relaxed and casual in "Man with the Cat" (1898), resplendent in a cream-colored suit and pink shirt.

This was also an international age, when artists and their patrons traveled widely to visit exotic cultures. Louis Comfort Tiffany's "Market Day Outside the Walls of Tangiers, Morocco" (1873) signals this interest and foreshadows the artist's later development of opulent interiors

Vast fortunes amassed during the Industrial Revolution led to a wave of elegant townhouses, and these were settings for fine collections and decorations. "Apollo with Cupids" (1880-82), a decorative panel by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John LaFarge, once adorned the dining room of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City. The work is embellished with African mahogany, hammered bronze, colored marbles, mother-of-pearl and ivory.

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Paintings by the visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder(...) are each a story of betrayal and redemption based on literary sources. The complex technique Ryder used causes his paintings to be unusually fragile, so the museum rarely lends his works. Special humidity controlled packing and shipping technology allows these works to be shared throughout America.

Winslow Homer, like Ryder, probed beneath the glitter of the Gilded Age to explore undercurrents of anxiety. "High Cliff, Coast of Maine" (1894) is among the greatest of Homer's late seascapes, a canvas filled with waves pounding on a rocky shore. These opposing forces of nature resonated in a society struggling with economic instability, labor unrest, and controversial new theories of Darwin, Freud, and others. The intimate world of women and children at home, seen in "An Interlude" (1907) by William Sergeant Kendall, offered refuge.

Artists and their patrons shared an ambition to present American civilization as having grown past provincialism to full maturity, equal to Europe's much-admired culture. Evocations of music abound, as in Childe Hassam's woman at a piano called "Improvisation" (1899) and Thomas Wilmer Dewing's allegorical "Music" (about 1895). Spiritual themes -- countering fears that Americans were overly materialistic -- appear in Abbott Handerson Thayer's four paintings in the exhibition, including the ever-popular "Angel" (1887).

Overall, the ambitions of individual artists and patrons, and of the nation at large, combined to make the period of the 1870s through the 1910s one of enormous achievement in the visual arts. "This thrilling exhibition truly captures the elegant, idealistic side of life and art in Gilded Age America," said Susan Earle, Spencer Museum curator of European and American art.