New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age

Margaret R. Laster is an independent curator and scholar of American art. Previous posts include Associate Curator of American Art at the New-York Historical Society, and Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art. Her research centers on art and material culture of the nineteenth century, including Gilded Age collecting and patronage histories. Chelsea Bruner is a member of the liberal arts faculty at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she teaches Design History. Her work centers on architecture and interiors of the nineteenth and twentieth century, with an emphasis on elite patronage and the professionalization of architectural design in the Gilded Age.

Introduction

Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner

Part I. Creating the Art and Cultural Capital

1. Looking West from the Empire City: National Landscape and Visual Culture in Gilded Age New York

David Scobey

2. The François Premier Style in New York: The William K. and Alva Vanderbilt House

Kevin D. Murphy

3. Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting at the Beginning of the Gilded Age

Alan Wallach

Part II. Institutionalizing Art and Culture in the Capital

4. The Lenox Library: New York’s Lost Treasure House

Sally Webster

5. Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World: Scribner’s Illustrated Monthly, 1870–1881

Page Knox

6. An Unsung Hero: Henry Gurdon Marquand and His 1889 Gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Esmée Quodbach

7. Metropolitan, Inc.: Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the Genesis of the American Art Museum

John Ott

8. Un-Domesticating the Ideal: William Wetmore Story and The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lauren Lessing

Part III. Depicting the Capital in Art and Culture

9. Before the Farragut: Who Was Augustus Saint-Gaudens?

Thayer Tolles

10. Crossing Broadway: New York and the Culture of Capital in the Late Nineteenth Century

David Jaffee

11. Bulls, Bears, and Buildings: William Holbrook Beard’s Wall Street

Ross Barrett

Afterword
Joshua Brown