HIGHLIGHTS FROM AMERICAN ART ABOUT AMERICAN ART COLLECTION ONLINE  AMERICAN ART CATALOGUE: FOREWORD  AMERICAN ART CATALOGUE: INTRODUCTION  AMERICAN ART CATALOGUE: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  HISTORY OF LACMA'S AMERICAN ART COLLECTION
The department of American art collects primarily oil paintings, watercolors, and sculptures that date from the colonial period to World War II. In addition, the department’s holdings include representational works created after 1940 by artists who came to prominence earlier. The collection serves as an excellent survey of the development of art and culture throughout the United States. It also provides a good display of regional art, not only through examples created by Southern California artists but also through works created in the area by artists visiting from other parts of the country or from abroad. The American collection is the oldest in the museum, for the first painting to have been acquired by the county was George Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers (1913), purchased in 1916. The museum’s first major donor, and the most important one for American art to this day, was William Preston Harrison (1869–1940), whose taste was primarily directed toward the contemporary art of his day. Since then donors have followed his example; as a result the collection’s strengths are the figurative works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers (1876), John White Alexander’s portrait of his wife (1902), and numerous paintings by Ash can school artists serving as splendid examples. Moreover, during the 1930s the museum was also the repository of easel paintings produced by artists working on the Southern California division of the federally sponsored Public Works of Art Project (1933–34). Consequently, the museum has on permanent loan significant examples by some of the finest of the area’s artists, and these supplement superb works by noted East Coast and midwestern American scene painters. Harrison was also responsible for initiating the museum’s watercolor collection. His selections in this medium were directed to the more progressive artists of his day. In 1955 the California Watercolor Society greatly expanded these holdings with a donation of award-winning paintings from its annuals exhibitions--- the only such collection in a public institution. Locally based artists had responded to the national revival of interest in watercolor painting that occurred after the First World War, forming the society in 1921. Examples from the watercolor collection are on display in a special gallery on a rotating basis. The collection, along with the museum’s related holdings of American decorative arts, was recently installed in newly designed, expanded galleries that emphasize the international context of our nation’s art.

Highlights from American Art

Browse American Art Collections online

Collections Online Exhibition:
American Art: Historical Periods

LACMA is proud to present eleven masterpieces from the American Art department (these works are not necessarily currently on view in the museum's galleries).

John Smibert divided his early career between Edinburgh, his birthplace, and London, where he variously studied art, worked as a plasterer, painted houses and coaches, and eventually set up as a portrait painter and copyist. He arrived in Italy in 1717, copied master paintings in Florence and Rome for his patron Cosimo III de' Medici, and then returned to London. By 1722 he had a studio there and was considered a leading portraitist.

Smibert arrived in the American colonies in 1728, attracted by climate, opportunity, and the promise of employment in a visionary utopian colony to be established in the Bermudas. It failed to materialize, but he remained, the first fully trained artist in the colonies. He established a highly successful portrait practice in Boston.

Smibert's painting of then-Major Paul Mascarene is in the grand tradition of European military portraiture and includes the customary although anachronistic suit of armor. Smibert's skill in showing the play of light on its surface, as well as the firm plasticity of Mascarene's figure, marks a notable stylistic advance over the flatness typical of earlier New England portraits.

Smibert composed beneath Mascarene's extended hand a still life of map and drafting instruments, which refer to the Major's coastal survey of Nova Scotia, Smibert was one of the few early colonial artists who sometimes painted actual landscapes as backgrounds to his portraits, rather than imaginary scenes. However, whether or not the fortification depicted here actually existed is not known.

John Singleton Copley's career is remarkable not only for his precocious talent but also because he was the first major American artist to achieve artistic maturity and success wholly through American training and experience. The son of poor Irish immigrant merchants, by age fourteen he was gaining a living in Boston with his artistic talent, and before he was twenty-one he had a successful portrait practice. Copley's painting style matured by the 1750s. He rapidly assimilated techniques from John Smibert, John Greenwood, and Thomas Blackburn and then surpassed them, mastering an opulent illusionism, firm sculptural form, rich color, and a range of courtly conventions. This portrait of an unknown woman displays Copley's technical virtuosity in the drapery folds and the damask-upholstered sofa. Strongly illuminated against an empty background, the woman relaxes; her informal pose and direct gaze reveal Copley's concentration on her personality. Her gown, a style then worn only in private or among the family, contributes to the intimacy of the study. Copley's attention to the sitter's thoughtful expression exemplifies the somber style of his 1770s portraits, which achieved a commanding psychological as well as physical realism and stand among his greatest American-subject masterpieces. Both Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West urged Copley to study in England. Reluctant to leave his prosperous studio, the artist, a loyalist, remained in the colonies until 1774, when revolution seemed inevitable. After a period of travel, he settled in London, and spent the second half of his career achieving even greater success in England.

A precocious talent like his contemporary John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West was painting portraits by age fifteen. He studied art briefly at the College of Philadelphia and then painted signs and portraits. With the financial help of friends he arrived in Italy in 1760, possibly the first American artist to study there. In 1763 West settled permanently in England, in possession of a developed painting style, amiable manners, and letters commending his talents and giving him social entrée. On the advice of a former client he turned from the secure living of portraiture to historical subjects. In Death of Wolfe (1771) he virtually revolutionized history painting by depicting protagonists in contemporary rather than classical garments. Cymon and Iphigenia, commissioned by the second earl of Buckinghamshire, may refer to finding the ideal wife. The painting alludes to Boccaccio's tale of the rustic and graceless young Cypriot noble Cymon, who was intellectually and emotionally awakened by Iphigenia's beauty. Usually depicted asleep and nearly nude, Iphigenia may be an allegorical portrait of Buckinghamshire's second wife. The somewhat stiff neoclassical style that West introduced to England, and which marks his work in the mid-1760s, gives way here to simpler forms, richer color, and a more elegant technique. Elements of exotic costume and the natural landscape in the background prefigure the romanticism that emerged in West's work of the 1780s. West remained popular and enormously influential until his death; his English success encouraged a generation of ambitious colonial artists to study with him.

In 1819 Thomas Cole emigrated with his family from Lancashire, England to Steubenville, Ohio. For the next several years the young man turned his hand to woodblock cutting and wallpaper design and became an itinerant painter, but he achieved little success. He also had literary interests and occasionally published poems and stories. After 1823 his reputation as a painter spread quickly when he sold a few paintings he had placed, without much hope, in a New York shop. Starting in 1829 he toured Europe, studied in Italy, and had a studio in Rome. In the years before his European sojourn Cole had painted from nature, observing the changing scene along the Hudson River. He also favored ideal landscapes depicting no specific location. Returning to New York in 1832, he turned to literary and allegorical subjects, sometimes painting works in thematically linked pairs. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are two such paintings. Taken together, they form a complex and allusive unity. They interpret the emotional and poetic, but not literal, content of two poems by John Milton. The simple life of peasants untainted by civilization was a prominent theme of both the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Here it emerges pictorially in an idealized landscape drawn from Italian architectural and intellectual history. Cole's pastoral Arcadians rejoice among ruins in the long light of late afternoon. The foreground dancer's pose, modeled after the dancing satyr of Pompeii's murals, suggests pagan undertones. The ruined arches, viaducts, and bridges refer to classical antiquity.

Raised in Boston and educated at Harvard, William Wetmore Story lived at the heart of privilege. He was friendly with the most literate and gifted of American and European society, including the Brownings, W.M. Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell. By the time Story devoted his considerable energies to sculpture, he already had a successful law practice and had published poetry, essays, and the papers of his father, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. The judge's death in 1845, a subsequent commission to execute his monument, and a debilitating bout of typhoid caused Story to leave law and eventually to take up sculpture full time. He and his family settled permanently in Rome in 1856. With Cleopatra, Story directed American neoclassical sculpture away from the detachment of Grecian ideals to a new romanticism and the potential for realism and psychological drama. The work established Story as the foremost American sculptor internationally as well as in America. The sculpture is a study of Cleopatra's passion and despair as she contemplates the action that will lead to her fall. A brooding expression crosses her African features, her posture is slumped, and her outstretched hand fidgets tensely. The work captured the imagination of an educated audience that set great store by narrative subjects. Pope Pius IX so admired Cleopatra that the Roman government paid all shipping costs in order to exhibit it in 1862 at the Roman Court of the International Exposition in London, where it made Story's reputation.

Between 1874 and 1876, shortly before he turned to the New England marine images that preoccupied him for the rest of his life, Winslow Homer traveled several times to Virginia on painting excursions. During the final siege of the Civil War he had covered the area around Petersburg as a correspondent-illustrator for Harper's magazine. It was here that he first made studies for a series of watercolors and paintings about the life of rural blacks, a subject artists and writers had generally treated in a range extending, at best, from the sentimental, melodramatic, or trivial to the sarcastic or patronizing. Contrary to these superficial interpretations, Homer now viewed the Southern black with realism, sensitivity, and restraint. His depictions of American blacks link him with artists such as Jules Breton and François Millet, who had portrayed European peasant subjects with similar nobility and strength. This painting represents the climax of Homer's early figural style. Viewed from a low vantage point, two powerful and majestic women fill the canvas and dominate the composition. Homer has captured a deep meditation in the downturned face of one, a somber reflection and yearning in the gaze of the other. When The Cotton Pickers was exhibited, some found Homer's interest in the American black incomprehensible, but the work was well received critically, and the artist was complimented for having seen new possibilities in a distinctly American subject matter.

Mary Cassatt occupies a unique place in American art. The only American painter to show work in the famed impressionist exhibitions, she gained the respect of Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Auguste Renoir, James McNeill Whistler, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Edgar Degas was her mentor and friend. Cassatt settled permanently in France in 1874 but continued to exhibit in the United States, influencing American collectors to acquire French impressionist works. Degas invited Cassatt to exhibit in the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879 and in many subsequent exhibitions. Reviewing her paintings in the sixth show, critic Karl Huysmans remarked that she had become "an artist who owes nothing any longer to anyone....children, interiors, gardens...it is a miracle how in these subjects...Miss Cassatt has known the way to escape from the sentimentality on which most [English artists] have foundered." In Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child a luminous and tender domesticity is Cassatt's subject, one to which she devoted nearly a third of her artistic production. Here she explores surface patterns, elements of composition she observed in Japanese prints, and the awkward naturalism of pose typical of Degas's work and an important element of the impressionist concern to catch a moment's movement or light. Cassatt had also begun to use a high-keyed palette, reflecting the impressionists' fascination with the effect of light. Intense in hue, this work reveals the interaction of white garments and flesh tones with the blues and greens of the setting. Brushwork and tints give the painting its shimmering surface.

Julius L. Stewart's education, career, and reputation were all formed in Europe. Son of the wealthy expatriate art collector William Stewart, this artist had entrée into the salons of rich Americans living abroad and their European friends. In this stratum of social privilege Stewart found virtually all his subjects. His popularity and success continued from 1878, when he first exhibited in the Paris Salon, to the end of the century. The Baptism, last of his elaborate group subjects, received acclaim at the Berlin International Exposition. In the late 1890s Stewart painted outdoor scenes of Venice, and later, depictions of religious subjects. By the end of the decade his career began to decline, and he received little further public or critical attention. Initially, Stewart painted single figures but soon became known for his elaborate narrative pictures. The painstaking detail of the figures assembled in The Baptism suggests particularity. The men's faces are strongly individual, although the women's are less so. The scene was probably inspired by a specific baptism, but the identity of the family is unknown. The Baptism, with its illusionism, elaborate composition, implied narrative, and slow ceremonial pace, is a tour de force of technical skill and a prime example of late nineteenth-century aesthetics. The richly covered damask walls, the silk, satin, and lace trim of the elaborate attire, and the soft, delicately rendered skin of the women and children are as astonishing as their identity is cryptic.

When John Singer Sargent returned to the United States in 1889 to arrange matters connected with a mural commission for the Boston Public Library, he had already earned international prominence as a portrait painter. Sargent spent June of 1890 in Worcester, Massachusetts, executing what proved to be among the most important of numerous portrait commissions from New York and Boston clients. His subjects, the socially prominent Mrs. Edward Livingston Davis and her young son, posed for Sargent in the Davises' stable, partly because it was high enough to accommodate the tall easel, and partly because its shadowy volume gave him a dramatic dark ground that avoided allusion to a specific location. This device enabled Sargent to focus on the characters and relationship of the pair. Mrs. Davis stands, a convention of formal portraiture, and her grace and composure are conveyed in her upright posture and direct gaze. While she and her son do not look at each other, the warmth of their relationship is evident in their clasped hands and in the casual but tender embrace that shelters the child. Humor, affection and resolve are revealed in the woman's spirited presence; patience and serenity in the boy's demeanor. As in his other family portraits Sargent avoids sentimentality. In this double portrait Sargent achieved a technical and formal tour de force as well as a sensitive and complex psychological study. Combining a dark palette with strong lighting (as if the pair were standing just inside the stable door) Sargent gained an overall effect of brightness. Following his early French master, Émile Carolus-Duran, Sargent here exploited the limits of his dark range of colors by taking advantage of tonal shifts in the blues and browns of the dress and background. The broad, loose brushwork acknowledges Sargent's debt to Dutch and Spanish masters, among them Frans Hals and Diego Velasquez, while the firm modeling and dramatic lighting of the woman's head share the realism of John Singleton Copley, whose work Sargent discovered in Boston.

George Wesley Bellows studied with the influential painter Robert Henri at the New York School of Art starting in 1904. Although not one of the Eight, the group of American artists allied with Henri in a rebellion against academic painting, Bellows was associated with them and shared their preoccupation with vigorous execution and urban subjects. Talented and widely recognized, Bellows at age twenty-seven became the youngest artist ever designated associate of the National Academy of Design, but he continued to support the avant-garde, and in 1913 (the year he gained full academician status) Bellows exhibited in the pivotal Armory Show, which he helped organize. Because of its urban subject matter, Cliff Dwellers has been interpreted as a critical social statement. Its meaning was confused by the fact that Bellows made a similar study with the editorializing title, "Why don't they go to the country for a vacation?" In fact Bellows and most artists of his group stopped short of overt polemics in their work. The true subject of his painting is the vitality and pleasures of the urban poor, not their deprivation or oppression. The mother ascending the staircase is reminiscent of works by Honoré Daumier and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin that depict women as the mainstays of family life. The group of young men, women, and tussling boys sets a tone of innocent joie de vivre. Behind the sunlit foreground, shadowed tenements with their populated balconies form a stagelike backdrop of vignettes suggesting the spontaneity and complexity of the dwellers' lives.

Childe Hassam was among the earliest and most significant of the American impressionists. He studied in Paris under Jules Lefebvre from late 1886 to the summer of 1889, became active in artists' organizations throughout the United States, and in 1897 was instrumental in establishing Ten American Painters, a group of American impressionists who seceded from the Society of American Artists because of its conservative politics. Cityscapes dominate Hassam's work. Early in his career he painted views of Boston. In the late 1880s he painted views of Paris. Watercolors and a small oil completed between 1887 and 1889 foretell his interest in flag paintings, and in 1910 Hassam depicted crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Paris's flag-decorated rue Danou. He began the first of many paintings with flag themes in 1916, in the patriotic atmosphere that marked the entry of the United States into World War I. This work depicts the block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth streets. Each block was devoted to the flag of one nation. The large flag of Brazil commands the scene, flanked by a British ship-of-war flag and that of Belgium. Hassam's earlier street scenes emphasize figures and crowds, but here the flags are paramount. Tall, sheetlike buildings frame the street. The flags are viewed from below, accentuating their scale. Against the light sky they create a lively two-dimensional pattern of color and design that dominates the crowded street. A sense of spaciousness and movement is conveyed through the light palette and the even, unfinished brushwork.