| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James F. O'Gorman. Accomplished in All Departments of Art: Hammatt Billings of Boston, 1818–1874. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 291. $39.95.

Who was Hammatt Billings? I surmise that most historians, myself included, might well offer this query. Now, with this carefully crafted, analytical biography, James F. O'Gorman has lifted the veil of obscurity from a multifaceted nineteenth-century artist and has simultaneously made a strong case for the undeserved nature of his neglect. 1

O'Gorman never overestimates his subject, however. Billings's overall influence was minor, his work sometimes pedestrian or worse. Rarely innovative, Billings was more the artist who was representative of contemporary cultural tastes and activities. But the wide scope of his achievements is what set Billings apart from others and made him a noted and noteworthy local and regional artist, appreciated by such diverse individuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the influential art critic James Jackson Jarves, as well as by the general population of Boston and its environs. . . .

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