Book of American figure painters
Author Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer American
Publisher J. B. Lippincott Company American
Not on view
Van Rensselaer’s lavish folio of art, essays, and poetry features figurative work by forty mainly European-trained artists, represented in photogravure plates as well as on the book’s cover and throughout its contents. An illustration of one of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s angels for the Edwin D. Morgan family tomb appears on the title page, two years after the incomplete marbles were destroyed by a fire at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut. The idealized figure holding a scroll must have appealed to Van Rensselaer for its Italian Renaissance inflection, a style she considered important and recommended to other artists.
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