El. knyga: Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking

Antebellum American Companion Paintings marks the first sustained study of companion paintings. It opens with a broad history that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, narrative sequences, religious thought, and aesthetic philosophy and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the companion format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole’s Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale’s Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format in 19th-century American art and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.