Outside the urban core of Philadelphia, the picturesque rural landscape proved a significant draw to many artists in search of the purportedly simple, wholesome, and moral quality of countryside living. Whether planned and intentional or more organic and serendipitous, colonies like those in New Hope, Chadds Ford, and Rose Valley in Pennsylvania, and Arden and Wilmington in Delaware, ...
Like other major American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, Philadelphia was an epicenter for the exuberant strain of architecture and design activity that came to be known as Art Deco. Fueled by the area’s economic importance and increasingly urban character after the First World War, designers, corporations, and manufacturers all engaged in a broad search for a distinctly American form of design ...
The elegant portraits of Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) found unanimous critical acclaim in Philadelphia, Paris, and New York. Her modern style of painting combined the best of academic training, European sophistication, and experimentation. Beaux successfully negotiated the gender separatism of the late nineteenth century while she gained international renown, allowing her to become the first ...
Dox Thrash (1893-1965) was an accomplished draftsman, printmaker, watercolorist, and painter, whose art reflected his experiences as an African American in Philadelphia. He became well known in the 1940s after developing the Carborundum printmaking technique at the Philadelphia Fine Print Workshop (311 Broad Street) of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. By rubbing coarse ...
The art of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is more deeply entwined with the city of Philadelphia than that of any other artist of the nineteenth century. Born in North Philadelphia in 1844, Eakins spent nearly his entire life in the city. He consistently took local residents as his subjects, portraying friends, family, and individuals he admired engaged in professional activities and leisure pursuits. ...
In the face of mounting unease with the social and environmental impacts of industrialization, Arts and Crafts advocates sought to mobilize architecture and the decorative arts in the service of recovering what they saw as the disappearing premodern values of craftsmanship, artistic harmony, and cultural ...
The unconventional artistic trajectory and prolific work of prominent Philadelphia-area artist and craftsman Wharton Esherick (1877–1970) have been claimed for and by multiple movements in the history of twentieth-century American art, from early-twentieth-century Arts and Crafts to postwar studio craft. Working across a wide variety of media, including printmaking, sculpture, furniture, and ...
In the decades after American independence, the atmosphere of liberty in Philadelphia spawned an artistic spirit that earned this city its reputation as the Athens of America. Here, enthusiasm for the arts grew with the same fervor and in the same houses, streets, and shops where the seeds of political freedom had been sown and ...
The Avenue of the Arts is the appellation for a section of Broad Street—from Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia to Glenwood Avenue in North Philadelphia—devoted to arts and entertainment facilities. The Avenue was conceived in 1993 by a coalition of public and private entities to attract visitors to Center City. Amid a decline in manufacturing, promoting entertainment amenities seemed ...
Businessman, chemist, educator, and art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as a center for art education organized around his growing collection of paintings, sculpture, and furniture. The institution earned international renown, less for its pedagogy than for its art collection, which, by mid-century, was world-class. Initially based in the ...
The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 is a masterpiece of American copperplate engraving and the first book of views to be entirely produced and published in the United States. Comprising twenty-seven scenes or “views” of Philadelphia’s buildings and streetscapes, the book aimed to ...
American cartooning began in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin, who introduced cartoons to North America, used images to galvanize viewers to action on the issues of their day. As the political, economic, and cultural capital of the early United States, Philadelphia became a center for producing political cartoons and humorous caricatures. Although New York eventually supplanted Philadelphia as ...
Once on par with other industries that gave Greater Philadelphia its reputation as the “Workshop of the World,” ceramic production played a key role in the region’s economic and artistic significance. Innovative makers and entrepreneurs produced a spectrum of utilitarian pottery and refined luxury goods, making visible the shifting patterns of consumption, taste, and technology use. While ...
Designed by renowned Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg (b.1929) and unveiled during Philadelphia’s year-long Bicentennial celebration in 1976, Clothespin is a 45-foot, 10-ton Cor-Ten steel sculpture at Centre Square Plaza (Fifteenth and Market Streets). The first major public artwork by Oldenburg in Philadelphia, this one-of-a-kind sculpture transformed the downtown landscape. An ...
Dream Garden, a glass mosaic designed by Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) measuring fifteen feet in height and forty-nine feet in length, caused a public sensation twice in Philadelphia’s history. The first time was in 1916 when it was installed in the foyer of the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, six months after a national debut at ...
The Gross Clinic, painted in 1875 by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), is among the most highly regarded American artworks from the nineteenth century. It depicts Dr. Samuel D. Gross (1805-84), an internationally celebrated surgeon who taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia from 1856 to 1882, overseeing surgery on a patient's left ...
The sculpture commonly known as “the LOVE statue,” first placed in Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Plaza for the 1976 Bicentennial, was not the only sculpture of its kind—by the twenty-first century, it was not even the only sculpture of its type in Philadelphia. Yet LOVE, by Robert Indiana (1928-2018), came to be embraced by Philadelphians ...
As the country's largest city, Philadelphia was well situated to chart the young republic's changing geography. Using its capacity to attract all the manufacturing elements necessary for successful publishing—printers binders, colorists, engravers and others—Philadelphia became the home of the nation's first full-time geographical publisher and soon became the center of the American map ...
Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs, at Sixteenth and Arch Streets at the start of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, is an 18-foot, 5-ton bronze sculpture by Nathan Rapoport (1911-1987). Dedicated on April 26, 1964, it was the first public monument memorializing victims of the Holocaust in North America and the only such monument in Philadelphia. In 2018, the surrounding triangular site, ...
The Morans, a multi-generational family of American artists, lived and worked in Philadelphia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Some contributed to the development of Philadelphia’s art world while others learned their trade locally then left to pursue professions elsewhere. Landscapes and seascapes were prominent among their subjects, although some of the Morans painted figural ...
Murals in the Greater Philadelphia region, like those in the United States at large, belong to an extraordinarily diverse set of histories and genealogies, from indigenous rock carving to decorations for private houses to paintings in public buildings and community initiatives. Philadelphia-area murals have spanned this diverse heritage, including three particularly important mural movements: ...
Painted in 1918 by Philadelphia artist Daniel Garber (1880-1958), The Orchard Window depicts the interior of Garber’s studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and features his 12-year-old daughter Tanis sitting in a sun-dappled window seat, reading a book. This large oil painting on canvas has been highly regarded as a prime example of Pennsylvania Impressionism, a ...
Philadelphia has a long, distinguished history as a center of American painting. In addition to the work of individuals and artistic family dynasties, the history of Philadelphia painters is linked with the city’s art schools, particularly the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), founded in 1805. Working locally and abroad, Philadelphia painters have connected the region with artistic ...
For over 125 years, the family headed by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) documented Philadelphia’s leading citizens and created paintings to decorate their homes. The Peales’ involvement in the arts enriched the cultural landscape of Philadelphia, and their work as naturalists and museum entrepreneurs advanced the cause of art, science and science education in the United ...
Inspired by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals celebrating humankind’s capacity to learn and use new information, the artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) conceived his Philadelphia Museum. In it, Peale intended the works of man and nature to coexist for the edification of all. The Philadelphia Museum, Peale said, served “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the ...
In 1805, a group of artists and elite Philadelphians founded the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as the first institution in the United States to operate as both an art museum and an art school. Throughout its history, the academy maintained two distinct reputations. On the one hand, it was a collecting and exhibiting ...
Pennsylvania Impressionist painting flourished in eastern Pennsylvania in the first half of the twentieth century. Often referred to as the “New Hope School” because artists in Bucks County produced the best-known works, the style was also practiced vigorously in Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Lehigh Counties, and key artists of the movement taught at the Pennsylvania ...
Philadelphia was the first American city, in the wake of various influences—including publicly supported art in post-World War II Italian cities—to establish “percent for art” programs, which require building developers to designate funds for public art. Philadelphia’s programs became models for other communities and a means of improving neighborhood ...
The Philadelphia Museum of Art—originally known as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art—developed from collections exhibited in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park. Modeled on the South Kensington Museum in London, the new institution sought through both collections and classes to teach design so that goods produced in Philadelphia would be ...
Founded in 1860, the Philadelphia Sketch Club became one of the oldest and longest continually operating American sketch clubs. Open to amateurs, students, and professionals, it became integral to Philadelphia’s artistic history. Initially founded as a weekly workshop by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) students and alumni, who sought drawing training and criticism, ...
When an exhibition of 247 paintings opened on February 17, 1917, at the Art Club of Philadelphia, 220 S. Broad Street, it heralded the birth of the Philadelphia Ten (also known as The Ten), an evolving all-women’s group of painters and sculptors that exhibited together for nearly thirty years. Soon their exhibitions became an annual ...
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia became a leading center of printmaking in the United States. While publishing companies had operated in the city since the eighteenth century, the technological innovations of the firm of Peter S. Duval (1804/5-86) transformed Philadelphia’s lithographic trade into a booming industry. Duval’s commitment to improving printmaking methods ...
Three young artists who took up residence at the old Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania, in the first decade of the twentieth century helped make Philadelphia a national leader in book and magazine illustration. They also successfully challenged the idea that only men could be “serious” and influential professional artists. The “Red Rose Girls”—Jessie ...
Philadelphia’s tradition of fine silver craftsmanship began in the late seventeenth century and was renowned by the mid- to late eighteenth-century, when city silversmiths produced exquisite pieces noted for their elegant design and expert workmanship. Silversmithing as a profession in Philadelphia extends back to the 1690s. (Note that silversmiths were sometimes also called “goldsmiths,” ...
After Charles Willson Peale’s The Staircase Group emerged from a private collection in the mid-twentieth century, the Philadelphia Museum of Art placed the compelling trompe l’oeil (deceive the eye) double portrait on display and it became widely reproduced in American popular and art historical literature. Its contemporary popularity echoed the popularity it enjoyed at Peale’s Philadelphia ...
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