Exhibition Review

Traveling exhibition. Aug. 14–Oct. 25, 1998, New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.; Nov. 19, 1998–Jan. 10, 1999, Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Feb. 5–April 4, 1999, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tex.; June 12–Sept. 26, 1999, the Museums at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, N.Y. Approximately 60 items (paintings, works on paper, print reproductions). Deborah J. Johnson, curator of the exhibition.	1
"William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life," exhibition handout.	2
William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life. By Deborah J. Johnson. Essays by Elizabeth Johns, Franklin Kelly, and Bernard F. Reilly Jr. (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1998. 161 pp. Paper, $29.95, isbn 1-885444-08-7.)	3
Given the recent scholarly interest in American genre painting—a fair amount of it focusing on its leading early practitioner, William Sidney Mount—it seems surprising that this exhibition comes billed (accurately) as the first major loan show produced on the artist known (somewhat less accurately) as the first American painter to devote himself extensively to genre imagery. Though the exhibition is relatively modest in scale, the scope of "William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life" is certainly comprehensive. Virtually all of the artist's important surviving paintings are included, along with oil studies, drawings and preparatory sketches on paper, and print reproductions after the paintings. About two-thirds of the items come from the collections at Stony Brook, the primary repository of Mount's work and his archive and an organizer of the show. Accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog, featuring a long biographical and analytical essay and three briefer articles on Mount's depictions of boys, his patrons, and prints after his work, the exhibition offers a valuable look at some of antebellum America's most compelling images, of interest today as much for the implications of their current interpretation as for the issues they engage (the two are, of course, related).	4
To a degree, exhibition and catalog present themselves distinctly. As the inclusion of the sketches and studies suggests, the chronologically organized show is in part oriented around the connoisseurial concerns of source identification and working methods. Label text is minimal and often focused on those issues, and the installation (I saw the exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, its opening venue) is spare—indeed, the nineteenth-century term "hanging" seems more apt. The effect is to promote the "art" of the images over and above a discussion of their cultural content, something of a missed opportunity given their richness in that regard and especially in light of the particular institutional setting. Excepting a few gems such as Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845), Mount was a gifted but not a great painter; the real interest of his work lies in its content, in how it addresses, in often veiled but intended ways, important social and political issues of the day, as well as how it unintentionally discloses attitudes about equally significant issues not nominally the subject of the paintings (constructions of and relations between the various stages in life, for example, or perceptions about the natural world and man's place in it).	. . .