The Metropolitan Craft Museum in Au courant York came approximately due to the eagerness and eyes of artists and benefactors in the behind 1800s.
The Civil War photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner brought the reality of the war to the public. Portrait photographer Alexander Hesler captured the likeness of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Pictorialism, a late 19th century movement of photography, lobbied for photography as an art form and inspired experimenting with chemical development and printing techniques to create different effects.
Design and Sculpture
All the while artists, sculptors and photographers continued to record the country's historic events, characters and landscape.Paintings and Painters, Late 1800s
Westward expansion in the late 1800s led to a popular art movement depicting the Western panorama, American Indians, military skirmishes and cowboy escapades. The Hudson River School, an informal group of American landscape artists, reflected mountain ranges through "luminism", a bright, tranquil style.
American artist Mary Cassatt defied female conventions of her time and exhibited with other impressionists in Paris. Meanwhile, Winslow Homer's etchings told the stories of people affected by the American Civil War. Homer later branched out into oils and watercolors, most notably his seascapes. John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler remain famous for their portraiture of the time.
Cartoons
Creative advertising began to crop up in publications and newspapers. Frederic Remington captured cowboys, military and American Indians in his sketches for "Harper's Weekly" magazine. Thomas Nast was arguably the most influential political cartoonist of the 19th century. Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives emerged as notable printers and lithographers of satiric political posters as well as quintessential American life. The famous Uncle Sam caricature, drawn by James Montgomery Flagg, became synonymous as spokesperson of the Union.
Photography
Photographs of the Civil War showed the brutality and reality of war.
The century salient up to the Industrial Revolution transformed the USA politically, economically and artistically. America had split in two, reunited and then rebuilt after a devastating strike. Wealthy industrialists such as the Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie families became collectors, supporting Craft by sponsoring the Metropolitan Craft Museum and the American Positive Arts Kingdom in Fashionable York City.
Starting around 1890 and continuing into the 1900s, the American arts and crafts movement gained recognition for simple, well built crafts. Art Nouveau raised crafts --- textiles, furniture, jewelry and glassware --- to the level of fine art. The Civil War created a large demand for statues of leading figures. John Quincy Adams Ward created "Indian Hunter" for New York City's Central Park. Boston Public Gardens commissioned Thomas Ball to create a statue of Washington mounted on a horse.
