“Corrupt Legislation” mural by Elihu Vedder, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, ca. 1898 (Library of Congress)
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the academically trained artists and architects of the City Beautiful movement strove to take what they had learned from their European masters and mold it into something truly American. They created civic plazas, public spaces, and grand buildings that interpreted and magnified the stories and themes of American history and honored its iconic leaders.
Muralists, some of whose works can be seen in Washington, D.C., played a key role in telling the visual stories that reflected a confident, idealistic nation—one in which art could serve as a moral force as well as a decorative expression.
Art historian Theodore Barrow examines the work of a generation of painters including Keyon Cox and Elihu Vedder, who created allegorical murals for the Library of Congress, and Jules Guerin, a muralist and illustrator whose paintings in the Lincoln Memorial symbolize the greatest accomplishments of the president’s era. He covers the influential work of John La Farge, whose murals and stained glass for Boston’s Trinity Church pioneered American narrative muralism in the Gilded Age.
In addition, Barrow examines the professional and aesthetic connections of these creators to fellow artists working in more popular (and less morally elevated) forms: illustration and comic strips. He finds that in their own way, artists like Winsor McCay, who drew the visually inventive Little Nemo strip, and George Herriman, cartoonist of Krazy Kat, share some of the narrative and decorative approaches used by the period’s leading muralists—and added an entertainingly populist voice to the telling of Gilded-Age America’s story.
Barrow is a Ph.D candidate in art history at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and teaches a course on the architectural history of New York at Baruch College.
World Art History Certificate elective: Earn 1/2 credit
Smithsonian Connections
Learn more about Kenyon Cox and John La Farge and see images of their works in Smithsonian collections.
