Full Description
Fueled by a flourishing capitalist economy, undergirded by advancements in architectural design and urban infrastructure, and patronized by growing bourgeois and elite classes, New York's built environment was dramatically transformed in the 1870s and 1880s. This book argues that this constituted the formative period of New York's modernization and cosmopolitanism—the product of a vital self-consciousness and a deliberate intent on the part of its elite citizenry to create a world-class cultural metropolis reflecting the city's economic and political preeminence. The interdisciplinary essays in this book examine New York's late nineteenth-century evolution not simply as a question of its physical layout but also in terms of its radically new social composition, comprising the individuals, institutions, and organizations that played determining roles in the city's cultural ascendancy.
Contents
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
