| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age. By Kristin Schwain. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiv, 172 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-4577-4.)
Kristin Schwain utilizes case studies of four artists to investigate American art and religion in relation to modernist aesthetics and socioeconomic modernization during the Gilded Age. She explores how the fine arts, as part of a broader visual culture, materially embodied spiritual ideas and feelings even as American religious practice became less a matter of conformity to church doctrines and more an expression of individual inner experience aesthetically responsive to sacred, devotional images.	1
Chapter 1 is devoted to the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins, an agnostic critical of Catholic Church dogma. Eakins, nevertheless, befriended various Catholic prelates and intellectuals whose portraits he painted. Schwain insists that "Roman Catholicism played a critical role" in helping the artist to understand "art as Logos" or "Word made flesh" (p. 14). The relatively brutal realism of Eakins's The Crucifixion (1880) corresponded with Catholic devotional practices by inviting meditation upon Christ, the Word incarnate. For Eakins, the Christian Logos symbolically supported the signifying power of realist art.	. . .

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