The Painted Word
Art & Photography December 2nd, 2009
“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
If you’re in Manhattan for the holidays—or indeed any time before January 24, 2010—don’t miss this major exhibition at the Met. More than 200 pictures, brought together for the first time, tell tales of ordinary people engaged in commonplace tasks and pleasures. John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassat are among the painters represented. There are picnic scenes, boating and bathing scenes, children playing card tricks, and ladies taking tea. Not surprisingly, we especially love “The Shoppers,” painted by William Glackens in 1907-8, on loan from the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
At the center of the painting is the artist’s wife, the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer, wearing a voluminous fur coat and assessing the saleswoman’s offering. According to the excellent book (“American Stories,” Yale University Press) that accompanies the show, Glackens set his scene in one of the new urban department stores that “encouraged middle-class woman to enjoy shopping as a group experience.” The text also points out that Mrs. Glackens and her expensively dressed companions bring to mind Lily Bart, Edith Wharton’s heroine in The House of Mirth (1905) who famously lamented: “If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed til we drop.”
Not a lot, it seems, has changed. This extraordinary show is worth a trip for “The Shoppers” and so much more.
Elusive Find: Oysterman
