Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) 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Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/custom/risdmuseum/templates/content/node--teaser.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('node', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 60) __TwigTemplate_b5820ae2fc9ac809d8bb920432eaa798->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/contrib/classy/templates/views/views-view-unformatted.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('In the January 1920 <em>Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design,</em> RISD Museum director L. Earle Rowe drew attention to the recent acquisition of a colonial American portrait by the British-trained painter L. Earle Rowe, “Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by Joseph Blackburn.” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, January 1920, VIII, 2–4. Ill. p. 1.. The elegant likeness of young Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (fig. 1), was sold to the museum by a descendant of Atkinson’s mother, Hannah, who with her husband, Theodore Sr., was painted by Blackburn in 1760 (figs. 2 and 3). The parents’ selection of the eminent Blackburn suited their station in life: Hannah was the sister of Benning Wentworth, governor of the province of New Hampshire from 1741 until 1767. Theodore Atkinson, Sr., served as president of the Council of New Hampshire, secretary and chief justice of the colony, and delegate to the Albany Congress. In the 1750s, Blackburn had brought English Rococo style to the sober tradition of American portraiture, and his emphasis on depicting luxurious textiles reinforced his popularity with patrons in Bermuda, Newport, Boston, and Portland, New Hampshire, where the Atkinson family flourished. In contrast to their refined and sober depictions, their son’s livelier image seemed to celebrate the energy and promise of the next generation. Vibrantly colored and meticulously drawn, it represented the twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate as if poised to assume his place in the world. The portrait became known as one of Blackburn’s most distinguished works and in 1911 was among a select group of paintings chosen to represent the artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Colonial Portraits: November 6 To December 31, 1911 (1911), no. 2, Theodore Atkinson, Jr., by Joseph B. Blackburn. In 1762, young Atkinson married his pretty young cousin, Frances Deering Wentworth, and subsequently commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint her portrait (Fig. 4). The newlyweds settled in Portsmouth, where Atkinson drew income from land grants and followed a preordained career path in which he served as secretary of the province of New Hampshire, member of His Majesty’s council, and collector of customs. His youthful momentum was tragically cut short in 1769 when he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two. After a notoriously short period of mourning, Frances married John Wentworth, a cousin with strong Tory sympathies, and fled with him to England before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. By the early twentieth century, the four Atkinson portraits had been separated from one another. Around 1918–1919, the portraits of the colonel and his wife found homes in museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Theodore Jr.’s came to Rhode Island. The image of Frances Deering Atkinson had left the fold earlier, and in 1876 entered the New York Public Library by way of the James Lenox collection. (Sold by the library in 2005, her portrait now resides at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.) When the younger couple’s likenesses were reunited at the 1911 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one seemed to have remarked that the strong color and crisp draftsmanship that characterized the wife’s portrait by Copley were also evident in Theodore’s, or noticed their shared distinctive contrast to the muted tones and simplified construction of the other Blackburn portraits nearby. In New York, the <em>Portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr.,</em> continued to signal the older artist’s best and most accomplished work, a position that was reinforced when it was featured as the frontispiece of Lawrence Park’s 1923 monograph <em>Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter</em>. Art historians are trained to determine the authenticity of works of art by studying their style, construction, and physical appearances, and by documenting their living history and chain of ownership. There was no doubt when the portrait of Theodore Atkinson, Jr., was acquired by RISD that it had descended in an unbroken family succession along with Blackburn’s signed portraits of his parents. Reputable scholars had published it as Blackburn’s work, and although there was no evidence of a signature, this was not uncommon in colonial portraiture. And yet, Earle Rowe was careful to note that the unknowns associated with relatively recent colonial art history were not unlike the challenges faced by Renaissance scholars. He mentioned a lack of documentary evidence about the “shadowy personalities and period of activity” of American artists, admitting that at present “the greatest mystery and fascination surrounds Blackburn, whose work had such a great influence on Copley,” and whose paintings had frequently been ascribed to the younger artist. In this case, Rowe had good reason to be cautious, as the long existence of the younger Atkinson portrait among the Blackburn portraits may have led to attribution by association. Theodore Jr.’s premature death, his wife’s remarriage, and the earlier dispersion of her portrait may have obscured obvious clues to the artist’s identity, for in fact, the 1757–1758 commission for his portrait was executed by Blackburn’s brilliant young follower from Boston: the twenty-year-old John Singleton Copley. The confusion over authorship endured until 1943, when in conjunction with the exhibition <em>New England Painting, 1700</em>–<em>1775</em>, held at the Worcester Art Museum, the American art historian and dealer William Sawitzky argued that the “sculptural form, solidity, linear precision and marmoreal flesh tones are closer to Copley than to Blackburn’s weaker formal sense and greater reliance on chromatic and tonal quality, even allowing for the influence that the precocious Copley exercised on his older English-trained colleague.”“News and Comments,” Magazine of Art 36 (Mar. 1943), p. 115. According to the March 1943 “News and Comments” column of <em>Magazine of Art</em>, Anne Allison, Charles K. Bolton, Louisa Dresser, Henry Wilder Foote, John Hill Morgan, Mrs. Haven Parker, and other experts in attendance agreed, and the portrait was assigned to Copley. Although the circumstances of Copley’s introduction to the Atkinsons are not known, they may have seen his portraits of the Reverend Arthur Browne’s family in Portsmouth, or become aware of the portraits Copley had painted of prominent Bostonians in poses identical to the one later chosen for their son.Janet L. Comey in Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1995), pp. 178–81, comprehensively analyzed Atkinson’s portrait and identified the similarly posed portraits of Joshua Winslow, 1755 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and William Brattle, 1756 (Harvard University Art Museums). She also noted the Atkinsons’ connections to the family of Reverend Arthur Browne of Queen’s Chapel, Copley’s earlier patrons in Portsmouth. Although barely twenty when he painted young Atkinson, Copley demonstrated immense skills in drawing and color, and astutely mined mezzotint portraits of English aristocrats for aspects of pose, setting, and costume.See Trevor Fairbrother, “John Singleton Copley’s Use of British Mezzotints for His American Portraits: A Reappraisal Prompted by New Discoveries,” Arts 55 (Mar. 1981), pp. 122–30. He had learned the techniques of painting by studying the works of other artists who practiced in Boston, including its leading portraitist, John Smibert, but his most dramatic advances took place around 1755 with the arrival in Boston of the English painter Blackburn. By 1758 he had perfected the most distinctive aspects of Blackburn’s manner, including the depiction of fine clothing and mastery of narrative-enhancing poses. Applying these skills to Atkinson’s portrait, he seamlessly incorporated the scion’s aristocratic appearance into the fiction of a young English lord striding forward to survey his country estate. Atkinson’s slender figure virtually inhabited the aggrandizing <em>contrapposto</em> stance with the grace of a dancer. His costume was likely virtual as well, as “invented dress” based on a variety of continental prototypes was common for both male and female portraits in the eighteenth century.Copley’s depiction of both male and female costume is discussed in Aileen Ribeiro‘s “‘The Whole Art of Dress’: Costume in the Work of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora and Staiti, et al., pp. 103–15. Copley chose to dress Atkinson in a muted salmon coat with deep boot cuffs and matching tight breeches, lavishing attention on his padded silk waistcoat. In a device lifted from contemporary British portraiture, Copley tucked Atkinson’s left hand into his trouser pocket, effectively emphasizing the vest’s silver embroidery and flaunting both its considerable expense and his own genius at rendering sumptuous textiles. Absent from this staging are the classical ruins or attributes of learning so often present in Grand Tour portraits of young British aristocrats. Atkinson’s landscape is pristine and has yet to be imbued with his accomplishments. Instead, evident and intertwined in the Copley portrait of Atkinson are the rising careers of two promising young American men. The combined effects of likeness, costume, and verdant acreage were enough to signal Atkinson’s distinguished pedigree and brilliant future. At the same time, they trumpeted Copley’s own precocious arrival, and his ability to convey personality and social status with skills that surpassed those of any other painter in the colonies, including the much-admired Joseph Blackburn, who unintentionally in the twentieth century wore the laurels of his youthful follower’s acclaim. <strong>Maureen C. O’Brien</strong> <strong>Curator of Painting and Sculpture</strong> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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