Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy is a landmark publication focusing on American narrative art from 1825 to 1870. A significant contribution to our understanding of taste and collecting during this period, it reasseses themes including the rural and the domestic, as well as a broad range of historical, literary and religious subject matter. American art at this time was dominated by powerful arguments about what constituted true art: should it be for the many, or the educated few, and should specifically American art forms and styles be favoured over more traditional, academic, European traditions. Making American Taste looks at these issues through the work of both well-known artists, like Benjamin West, Asher B. Durand and Eastman Johnson, and less familiar names such as Daniel Huntington, Henry Peters Gray and Louis Lang. Table of Contents Foreword by Louise Mirrer, President and CEO, the New-York Historical Society Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America by Barbara Dayer Gallati Nature's Nation: American Taste and Landscape Painting, 1825-1876 by Linda S. Ferber Luman Reed and Robert L. Stuart: A Double Portrait by Ella M. Foshay Artist Biographies and Catalogue Entries by Barbara Dayer Gallati and Kimberly Orcutt AUTHOR: Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004). Linda S. Ferber is vice president and senior art historian at the New-York Historical Society. She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County. Ella M. Foshay is an independent art historian, and author, with Barbara Novak, of Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Cullen Bryant (2000). Kimberly Orcutt is curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society, and chair emerita of the Association of Historians of American Art. 85 colour p80 b/w illustrations
