Word: mount
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...doubtful whether anyone is ever going to look back on William Sidney Mount (1807-68) as a great American painter; the charm of his work is too modest, its range of feeling too circumscribed, for that. And yet, as the show of his paintings, drawings and prints at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan (before traveling to Pittsburgh, Pa., and Fort Worth, Texas) makes clear, there were reasons for his popularity, and he has a special place, very much his own, in the making of American art. Why? Because, with the slightly younger George Caleb Bingham...
Genre means, broadly speaking, the depiction of manners, work, morals--of men and women as social creatures. It's inherently a modest art, unlike the other model to which painters aspired when Mount was growing up: the Grand Manner, the elevated form of historical or mythic narrative, full of heroes and demigods, pagan or biblical. The trouble was that the Grand Manner was scarcely attainable in 1830s America. Not even Thomas Cole, a considerably more gifted artist than Mount, had managed to do it without bathos. Benjamin West, the prodigy from Philadelphia, had brought it off--but by going...
...surprising that Mount, whose art education began when he apprenticed himself to his brother, a sign painter, should have made a few early stabs at the Grand Manner; and even less so that he was wholly inept at it. Greece, Rome and Israel were very far from bustling, nouveau-riche young America. Mount, a farmer's boy from Setauket, Long Island (a suburb today, deep country then), was very much part of that America, a country inventor who made his own boats and believed that a "hollow-backed" violin he had designed was better than anything from Cremona. Sensibly...
...Mount's preferred tone was down-home and nationalist: he was the first artist to paint the Yankee as a type. He painted barn dances, parlor courtships, farmers husking corn, truant children and jolly drunks. "Never paint for the few but for the many," he reminded himself in one of the numerous notebooks he kept, and the manifesto of this belief (not, alas, in this show) is The Painter's Triumph, 1838. It depicts Mount himself in a mood of exaltation, flourishing his palette and brushes and pointing out a detail of a painting to his ideal viewer...
What his clients liked best was amusing anecdote with moral overtones, but Mount liked to go a little further than that, embedding political messages in his work. These, naturally, have become catnip to recent American scholars striving to excavate social issues from art. It may be, as art historian Elizabeth Johns argues in the catalog, that Mount's best-known picture--Farmers Nooning, 1836, with its strongly, even nobly, realized figure of a black laborer taking his siesta on a pile of hay while a boy in a tam-o'-shanter mischievously tickles his ear with a grass stalk...