| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Accomplished in All Departments of Art: Hammatt Billings of Boston, 1818–1874. By James F. O'Gorman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xii, 291 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55849-148-1.)

"Who was Hammatt Billings?" James F. O'Gorman begins with this fundamental question, and indeed it is a proper starting point, given the obscurity into which this singular nineteenth-century designer has fallen. O'Gorman makes no claims for forgotten genius; he readily admits that Billings's output is unprepossessing. Rather, his importance lies in the varied ways Billings served the imagistic needs of a broad Boston audience. Deployed for an astonishing array of media, Billings's "pencil" provided drawings, watercolors, paintings, periodical and book illustrations, sheet music covers, advertisements, and commemorative certificates, as well as designs for tombstones, furniture, gardens, festal parades, firework displays, sculptural monuments, and buildings. His work, O'Gorman stresses, spanned the elite and the vernacular, and it is the latter category that the author suggests will be of most interest to scholars. . . .

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