Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture Book

Jules Prown is renowned as a historian of American art and a pioneer in the study of material culture, a discipline that attempts to achieve a more profound understanding of individuals and societies using works of art as tangible evidence. This important book celebrates Prown's distinguished career, bringing together eighteen of his most influential essays, along with a new introductory chapter, an intellectual autobiography that explains the evolution of his life's work. The volume begins with theoretical essays that document Prown's thinking as a cultural art historian, followed by the presentation of a number of his finest writings on American art. These pieces focus on the work of key eighteenth-century American artists-Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull-who painted in England as well as in America, and on the work of such major nineteenth-century artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. The essays reveal Prown's trajectory as an art historian: the earlier ones are examples of more traditional art historical methodology, as Prown investigates formalist and iconographic techniques, and the later ones demonstrate his developing interest in unpacking cultural meaning from objects. What results is a remarkable collection that clearly conveys the import of Prown's contribution to the study of American art and material culture.Read More