Prown Jules David. American painting: from its Beginnings to the Armory Show

Skira, 1969. — 154 p.The Story of American painting begins in the Colonial
period, in the seventeenth century. "The most obvious
fact about early American painting," writes Jules David
Prown, "is that there was so little of it. When European
colonists began to establish permanent settlements on
the eastern flank of North America, they had other
things on their minds than the painting of pictures.
Faced with a pressing necessity to satisfy their primary
life needs—food, shelter, clothing—they adopted a way
of life and a view of the world that was necessarily
pragmatic. For them the arts seemed dangerously irrelevant,
a distraction from the serious tasks at hand.
That pragmatic attitude has characterized American
culture from its inception to the present day, and has
profoundly affected the trajectory of American art."
That trajectory is traced in detail in the pages of this
book: from the earliest surviving Colonial paintings,
all of them portraits, down to the famous Armory Show
held in New York in 1913. John Walker aptly sums up
the art of these two and a half centuries: "There were
three outstanding Colonial painters: West, Copley, and
Stuart. No artist measured up to them until the second
half of the nineteenth century, when America produced
three more masters of the first rank who worked in
Europe: Mary Cassatt, Whistler, and Sargent. That
same generation brought forth three artists equally
distinguished who remained at home: Eakins, Homer,
and Ryder. The text of this book brilliantly proves that
these nine painters make the American School illustrious
by any standards.