The title suggests emotional ease, but American artist Maxfield Parrish makes contentment feel constructed as much as felt. By 1927, he was one of the most famous image-makers in the United States, celebrated for painstaking technique, glowing layered color, and scenes that could move easily between fine art and mass reproduction. This picture belongs to his well-known “girls on rocks” era, a formula that became enormously popular through commercial commissions, including an Edison Mazda calendar. Two young women sit close together on a sunlit rocky ledge in a dreamlike landscape. The woman at left sits higher, her body turned three-quarters toward us, one knee drawn up and loosely encircled by her arms. Her other leg extends downward over the rock face, her bare foot suspended in open air. Her draped garment is warm brown with violet undertones, catching amber light across the shoulder and thigh. She has light skin and softly waved golden hair. She glances down at a second young woman beside her who has fair skin and darker brown hair and sits lower on the ledge in a pale lilac-pink dress. She leans slightly forward and tilts her face toward the sun, creating a quiet moment of each witnessing beauty. Behind them rises a massive field of deep violet shadow, broken only at the top by distant blue and rose-tinted mountains. Parrish paints the stone in glowing oranges, mauves, and purples, so that the figures seem held between warmth and coolness plus nearness and distance so nothing interrupts the mood. The painting sits between fantasy and advertising as well as intimacy and design. The women are calm, but they are also arranged with precision to become emblems of serenity in a modern visual marketplace hungry for beauty, light, and escape. Parrish’s gift was to make artifice feel effortless. The result is both tender and slightly unreal with companionship as atmosphere, leisure as ideal, and femininity transformed into a radiant, collectible dream.

“Contentment” by Maxfield Parrish (American) - Oil on masonite / 1927 - National Museum of American Illustration (Newport, Rhode Island) #WomenInArt #MaxfieldParrish #Parrish #MaxParrish #NMAI #NationalMuseumofAmericanIllustration #arte #art #artText #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #1920sArt

#SPRING & the Ashcan School
‘Spring Hillside’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). Oil on canvas.
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt

Source/Photographer:Archives of American Art, Smiths https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WPA-Mural-Power-Eric-Mose-2.jpg

in the library can explain its design.’
@livingnewdeal.bsky.social
#GreatDepression #TheNewDeal #WPA #FederalArtProject #blackandwhitephotography #EricMose #AmericanArt #Bronx #GompersHighSchool #mural #FrescoSecco

James Denmark, "Daily Gossip," mixed media, 1975; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture. #art #arte #mixedmedia #noai #blackhistory #blackculture #africanamerican #americanart #museum #artgallery

‘Paul Manship’s large figural groups are idealized and refer to mythic characters and stories. The artist used the same stylization in his animal sculptures as in his figural groups, but to different effect. In an intimate scale, this stylization accentuates the decorative quality of each animal. By exaggerating certain features or expressions, Manship also lets a little bit of their personalities peek through. This is especially visible in his gilded works, where the gold patina highlights the contours of the animal’s forms and their precise surface details. Many of Manship’s animal sculptures were originally created as part of his design for the gates of New York’s Bronx Zoo.’ https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/pelican-16003

#wildlife #biodiversityawareness #WorldWildlife
‘Pelican’ #PaulManship (1885-1966) & Angelo Colombo.
Gilded bronze on lapis lazuli base.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. 1932.
👉ALT
#biodiversity #ornithology #pelicans #sculpture #AmericanArt

#SPRING & #EASTER of 1926 - the Ashcan School
‘Easter Eve, Washington Square’ John French Sloan (1871-1951). Etching. 1926.
#JohnFrenchSloan #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt #Easter #Manhattan #WashingtonSquare

Two women sit close together on the ground amid dense, oversized leaves that press around them like a living backdrop. The woman at left faces us directly. She has dark hair parted at the center, small red earrings, a pale blue blouse, and a deep plum skirt. In her arms, she cradles a long orange squash, while several pale cut rounds of squash lie on the earth in front of the pair. The woman at right turns in profile toward her companion. She wears a vivid red-orange blouse and a dark skirt, her black hair pulled back smoothly. Both figures are built from rounded, weighty forms, with broad hands, strong forearms, and calm, self-contained expressions. Both women are painted with medium-to-deep brown skin tones, and American artist Lucretia Van Horn gives that brownness a warm, solid presence rather than treating it as incidental detail. The painting compresses space so that the women and the surrounding plants seem almost pressed against the picture surface, giving the scene an intimate yet monumental stillness. That sculptural stillness is part of the painting’s power. Van Horn does not treat these women as decorative types. She gives them gravity, dignity, and presence. JLW’s artist essay notes that “Two Women with a Squash” reflects the impact of Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists on her work, especially in its flattened space, simplified modeling, and sympathetic treatment of women in a natural setting. Van Horn, born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1882 and later active in Berkeley’s modernist circles, had studied in New York and Paris before travel in Mexico reshaped her art. She assisted Rivera, absorbed his monumental approach to the human figure, and translated that influence into her own language. Here, sustenance, land, and womanhood are bound together as the squash is not just a still-life detail, but a sign of bodily nourishment, rural labor, and continuity with the earth.

“Two Women with a Squash” by Lucretia Van Horn (American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1930 - JLW Collection (Sun Valley, Idaho) #WomenInArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #LucretiaVanHorn #VanHorn #JLWCollection #arte #art #artText #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #JLW #WomenPaintingWomen #WomensArt #1930sArt

Koya Abe: Girl at Piano I from the series Duplication/American Original, Topology of Art Chapter 9 (2014), archival inkjet print. www.koyaabe.com

#koyaabe #popart #art #Japaneseart #Americanart

N.C. Wyeth
American artist
1882-1945
Herring!, ca. 1935
oil on canvas
48 1/8 x 52 1/8 inches

#N.C.Wyeth
#Americanart

This painting marked a turning point for American artist Amy Sherald in 2018, just after the national attention surrounding her portrait of Michelle Obama. It was the first work she made after that historic commission and one of the first in which her imagined world opened into a full landscape. Sherald said she had wanted for years to place figures in an open field, and the rocket arrived as a symbol of “unlimited potential,” but also as something coded in American culture as white and male. Here, she reclaims that symbolic space. Two young Black women stand barefoot in a wide field of dry yellow grass, seen mostly from behind as they hold hands. The woman at right turns her head back toward us, with a calm, direct, slightly questioning gaze. The other looks forward toward a rocket launch in the distance. Sherald paints both figures in her signature grayscale rather than naturalistic skin color, while their clothing carries vivid life. The woman on the left wears a white shirt with a high-waisted blue skirt. The other wears a striped dress in bright bands of pink, orange, yellow, and green, with a white bow at her hair. At the far left, a rocket lifts into the sky, its plume running almost like a vertical white scar or beacon beside them. The horizon sits low, making the sky feel immense and the figures quietly monumental. The two sitters were not celebrities but women Sherald met through a Baltimore school community, one a teacher and one a graduate, which matters. Everyday Black life, not spectacle, is the center of the picture. Their joined hands suggest solidarity, intimacy, and shared witness. The title stretches between machinery and mystery as well as between earthly limits and mental freedom. Sherald turns the “spaces in between” into a zone of dreaming, self-possession, and possibility for an image of Black womanhood not under scrutiny, but already sovereign.

"Planes, rockets, and the spaces in between" by Amy Sherald (American) - Oil on canvas / 2018 - Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #AmySherald #Sherald #BaltimoreMuseumOfArt #artBMA #BMA #art #artText #BlackArt #AmericanArt #BlackArtist #WomenArtists

#SPRING & the Ashcan School
‘Road In Spring’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939)
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt

#EASTER & the Ashcan School
‘Easter Snow’
George Bellows (1882 – 1925). Oil on canvas. 1915.
#GeorgeBellows #AmericanArt #AshcanSchool #landscape

American artist Norman Rockwell painted this image in 1918, when he was only in his early twenties and the First World War was still reshaping everyday life. Rather than showing soldiers overseas, he turned to the emotional labor of the home front like waiting, reading, hoping, and fearing. On a sandy bluff above a dark blue shoreline, four young white women gather in a mood of waiting rather than leisure. One sits front and center in a rose-and-rust patterned dress, elbows on knees, her chin pressed into both hands, staring out with tired, worried eyes. Beside and behind her, a woman in blue folds inward toward the sea. Another in a mustard-brown dress and broad hat sits in profile. A fourth stands in a pale blue-gray dress with a deep red sash, her arms lifted over her head against a sky crowded with swelling clouds. At their feet lie a small basket and a letter marked by wartime censorship. Far below, tiny figures dot the beach, but their distance only deepens the feeling of separation. The women’s bodies feel suspended between stillness and strain, as if time itself has slowed. The picture so effective because its drama is quiet. The sea becomes both literal horizon and symbolic barrier, the place where loved ones have vanished from sight. The censored letter matters because it stands for contact that is partial, delayed, and controlled by war. Even good news arrives wounded. Painted in oil on canvas and then published as the cover of Life on August 15, 1918, the painting turns magazine illustration into shared national feeling. Rockwell gives each woman a different posture of anxiety, so the scene is like a study of longing: exhaustion, vigilance, resignation, and stubborn hope. It is sentimental, yes, but not shallow. The artist asks us to remember that war is endured not only in battlefields, but also in the aching intervals between letters, on porches, in parlors, and here, on a bluff above the sea, “till the boys come home.”

“Till The Boys Come Home” by Norman Rockwell (American) - Oil on canvas / 1918 - Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (Lakeland, Florida) #WomenInArt #NormanRockwell #Rockwell #AGBMuseum #AmericanArt #art #artText #WWIArt #AmericanArtist #BlueskyArt #arte #AmericanIllustration #1910sArt #WarArt

The #SPRING of 1913 - the Ashcan School
‘Spring Planting, Greenwich Village’
John French Sloan (1871-1951). Oil on canvas. 1913.
#JohnFrenchSloan #JohnSloan #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt
poulwebb.blogspot.it/2012/12/ashc...

American artist Mario Moore made this work as part their “A New Frontier” series that investigates Detroit’s fur trade and the often-overlooked role of enslaved Black labor within it. Instead of depicting the powerful men usually centered in frontier history, he places Black women at the heart of the scene and gives them the scale, elegance, and permanence traditionally reserved for those who controlled wealth and narrative. Five Black women occupy a snowy Michigan landscape with striking calm, authority, and warmth. At center, a tall woman in a long black dress and fur wrap stands in profile, her body turned like a monument between the seated and standing figures around her. To the left and right, older women in fur coats sit in red chairs, their expressions reflective and steady. Behind and beside them are two more women, one in a silver dress and one writing at a table. Their skin tones range from light brown to deep brown. Their hairstyles, jewelry, fabrics, and furs create a rich interplay of softness, sheen, and weight against the cold blue-white snow and distant trees. Moore identifies them as women central to his own life: his grandmothers Helen Moore and Yvette Ivie, his sister Denise Diop, his wife Danielle Eliska, and his mother Sabrina Nelson. The painting feels both intimate and ceremonial, like family portraiture expanded into history painting. The furs carry layered meanings like beauty, status, memory, labor, and exploitation. Moore has said he was thinking about Black people existing in the Midwest, in snow, in landscapes from which they are often visually excluded. Here, the women become warmth in a cold space and “pillars” across generations as mentors, makers, mothers, muses, and survivors. First shown in “Mario Moore: Revolutionary Times,” the painting later entered GRAM’s collection through an acquisition supported exclusively by Black donors, deepening its message about legacy and visibility on museum walls.

“Pillars of the Frontier” by Mario Moore (American) - Oil on linen / 2024 - Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, Michigan) #WomenInArt #MarioMoore #art #arttext #blueskyart #artoftheday #GrandRapidsArtMuseum #AmericanArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #PortraitofWomen #BlackArtist #AmericanArt

The #SPRING of 1914 - the Ashcan School
‘French Farmhouse, Spring’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). 1914.
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt

The #SPRING of 1913 - the Ashcan School
‘Willows In Spring’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). 1913.
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt

The #model and the final #sculpture #americanart

The title is direct and documentary, almost journalistic. It names both the workplace and the city, insisting that this labor matters and belongs to the visible life of Cincinnati. American artist Caroline Augusta Lord was herself a Cincinnati artist, internationally trained in Paris and New York yet deeply attentive to ordinary local subjects. By 1911, she was an established painter and longtime teacher at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and her series on Acme Laundry shows her turning serious artistic skill toward women’s paid work. A large industrial laundry room opens across the canvas, crowded with women at work. In the foreground, several figures are turned away from us, their backs broad under white aprons tied over long dark skirts and pale blouses. Beyond them, more women stand in rows at tables and machines, sorting, folding, pressing, or handling linens. The room feels busy but ordered as belts, wheels, work surfaces, and stacks of cloth create a rhythm of labor that pulls us deep into the space. Lord paints the collective effort. The women appear adult, white, and working class, dressed practically for early 20th-century wage labor. Their sleeves are rolled and their postures bent while a few visible faces show concentration. The atmosphere is bright yet strenuous, with steam-white fabric and aprons standing out. Rather than presenting domestic laundry in the home, she records laundry as industry: repetitive, physical, underpaid, and essential. The painting’s meaning lives in that tension between order and exhaustion, anonymity and solidarity. These workers are not romanticized, but neither are they diminished. Lord gives them scale, structure, and dignity. The composition has the balance of a history painting, yet its subject is everyday labor by women whose work was often overlooked. In that way, the canvas quietly argues that modern working women deserved the same artistic attention traditionally reserved for elites, myths, or men in public life.

"Acme Laundry in Cincinnati" by Caroline Augusta Lord (American) - Oil on canvas / 1911 - Canton Museum of Art (Canton, Ohio) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #CarolineAugustaLord #CantonMuseumOfArt #art #artText #laundry #AmericanArt #SocialRealism #WomenPaintingWomen #1910sArt

David Kapp
American artist
b. 1953
Coming Out of the Subway, 1998-99
Oil on linen
152.1 x 152.1cm

#Americanart

The #SPRING of 1913 - the Ashcan School
‘Spring Night, Harlem River’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). Oil on canvas. 1913.
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt #WashingtonBridge #HarlemRiver

Image from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/calendar1.html

Image from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/calendar3.html

Image from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/calendar2.html

production as a “waste of taxpayers' money"’ - though the accompanying message of greetings stated: ‘The other than labor costs of making the calendar are being privately defrayed.’
@livingnewdeal.bsky.social
#AmericanArt #graphicdesign #graphicdesigners #RichardHalls #WPA #FederalArtProject

#art #fineart #artstream #artreview #artdiscussion #artcritique #arttalk #americanpainting #americanart #americanartist #ceciliabeaux #nationalportraitgallery #smithsonian #patricksaunders #patricksaundersfinearts #representationalart #realistart #portraitpainting #MuseumTourTuesday

'Paul Manship’s large figural groups are idealized and refer to mythic characters and stories. The artist used the same stylization in his animal sculptures as in his figural groups, but to different effect. In an intimate scale, this stylization accentuates the decorative quality of each animal. By exaggerating certain features or expressions, Manship also lets a little bit of their personalities peek through. This is especially visible in his gilded works, where the gold patina highlights the contours of the animal’s forms and their precise surface details. Many of Manship’s animal sculptures were originally created as part of his design for the gates of New York’s Bronx Zoo.' https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/king-penguin-15919

3 #MARCH #WorldWildlifeDay
‘King Penguin’ Paul Manship (1885-1966) & Angelo Colombo. Gilded bronze on lapis lazuli base. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 1932.
👉ALT
#wildlife #biodiversity #ornithology #penguins #PaulManship #sculpture #AmericanArt

#SPRING - the Ashcan School
‘Spring, Grammercy Park’
John French Sloan (1871-1951). Oil on canvas. 1912.
#JohnFrenchSloan #JohnSloan #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt #GrammercyPark

#art #modernart #color #ellsworthkelly #compositionIII #c1964 #americanart #abstractart

3 #March #WorldWildlifeDay
‘Design for the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gateway, New York Zoological Park’
#PaulManship (1885-1966). Pen & ink, watercolor, crayon, gouache, pencil on paper.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
1934
#wildlife #biodiversity #BronxZoo #sculpture #AmericanArt

#SPRING – the Ashcan School
‘Spring Morning’
Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). Oil on canvas. 1913.
#ErnestLawson #AshcanSchool #AmericanArt

American artist Allan Rohan Crite described himself as an “artist-reporter,” and this painting shows that ethic clearly. Made in 1936, the year he finished his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and while he was working within the WPA era, the picture records children leaving the annex of Everett Elementary School in Boston’s South End, where boys and girls were taught separately. A wide city street opens in bright afternoon light as a crowd of schoolchildren pours out from a brick school building and fenced yard. Most of the figures are girls, joined here and there by adult women who seem to be mothers, older sisters, or caretakers. Crite arranges them in small clusters so the painting feels lively but never chaotic. Some children stroll shoulder to shoulder, some hurry ahead, some pause to talk, and one pair appears caught in a brief disagreement. Dresses, bows, hats, socks, and polished shoes vary from child to child, giving each girl her own presence rather than reducing the group to a pattern. The sidewalks are clean, the school and neighboring apartments are carefully kept, and the whole scene feels structured, observant, and full of motion. Although dozens of figures appear, the mood is intimate. This is not a spectacle but a neighborhood moment, seen with care from within community life. The painting reaches beyond one place. Rather than portraying Black urban life through stereotype or hardship alone, Crite insists on dignity, order, individuality, and shared belonging. Even during the Depression, he paints a stable neighborhood whose strength comes from family, schooling, and mutual care. The women and girls are central to that meaning. They carry the rhythm of the scene and embody continuity between home, street, and school. The result is both documentary and quietly radical for a vision of Black everyday life as dignified, self-possessed, and worthy of lasting record.

“School’s Out” by Allan Rohan Crite (American) - Oil on canvas / 1936 - Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, District of Columbia) #WomenInArt #art #artText #AllanRohanCrite #Crite #SmithsonianAmericanArtMuseum #SAAMuseum #AmericanArt #BlackArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #1930sArt

Horace Pippin, "Harmonizing," oil on canvas, 1944; Allen Art Collection, Oberlin College. #art #modernart #blackhistory #blackculture #africanamerican #americanart #paintings #oilpainting #museum #artmuseum #artgallery