: Women were arguably the most common subject for American artists
in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, feminine
beauty became a symbol of American culture in the wake of the
Civil War and through the Gilded Age.
American artists, however, approached the subject of females in
contrasting ways. The long-term tradition of presenting women as
chaste, demure and beautiful continued at the same time that
other painters heralded the onset of the independent, strong,
self-reliant "New Woman."
The two approaches are showcased in concurrent exhibitions.
"Pretty Women: Freer and the Ideal of Feminine Beauty," on view
at the Freer Gallery of Art through September 17, documents the
collecting tastes of Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919). Guest
curated by art historian Susan A. Hobbs, it features oil
paintings by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Abbott Handerson Thayer and
James McNeill Whistler that reflect their patron's affinity for
high-toned, often ethereal, images of good-looking ladies in
gowns and kimonos in genteel settings.
The second show, "Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of
Homer, Chase and Sargent," at The Newark Museum, on view through
June 18, features 100 works by leading artists of the day, who
also included Thomas Eakins and Charles Dana Gibson. They
depicted the first generation of emancipated American women who
emerged in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. It is
co-curated by Holly Pyne Connor, The Newark Museum's curator of
Nineteenth Century American art, and Mary Kate O'Hare, the
museum's assistant curator of American art.
Freer, who was born in Kingston, N.Y., made millions building
railroad cars in Detroit and became a world-class art collector.
He is best known for his enormous holdings of Asian art, which
formed the core of the Smithsonian Institution museum that bears
his name, opened in 1923.
In this autobiographical painting, "The War Spirit at Home; or,
Celebrating Victory at Vicksburg," Lilly Martin Spencer shows
herself trying to balance her baby and her newspaper, as her
other children parade around in a disorderly manner, suggesting
a stressful life juggling family and career. The Newark Museum.
Freer assembled a smaller, high-quality collection of works
by a very limited group of American artists. Drawn to Dewing's
sophisticated aestheticism, Thayer's affinity for the Old Masters
and Whistler's association with Asian art, Freer encouraged each to
create images of idealized females. Many are encased in striking
gold frames designed by architect Stanford White; Whistler
fashioned his own.
Although the women depicted in Freer's collection were placed on
a pedestal, most were professional models whom he knew personally
or knew about. "Such knowledge," observes curator Hobbs, "must
have added a certain frisson of sexual innuendo to these
otherwise idealized images."
Moreover, such likenesses represented a kind of distanced access
to feminine beauty, well insulated from many actual women of the
day, whom Freer found threatening - and who are featured in the
Newark Museum exhibition. As Freer once complained to painter
Dwight Tryon, "the modern American woman...with her fancies of
independence, rights, wrongs, extravagances, dress and other
diabolical tendencies is startling to all sensible people - both
male and female, around the world." "In the end," says Hobbs,
"Freer's images of women painted by his friends were artistic
expressions that he most enjoyed on that basis alone, quite aside
from considerations of moral or social ambiguity."
Dewing (1851-1938), who was born in Boston and trained in Paris,
pursued his career in New York City, with summers in Cornish,
N.H. In creating some of the most highly idealized images of
women of his time, Dewing "explored the enigmatic aspects of
American womanhood in works that are subtle, psychological and
provocative," observes Dewing scholar Hobbs. Freer acquired 42
works by Dewing, a number of which graced his home in Detroit.
