The Art of American History

“The Art of American History,” a new exhibition now on view at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, offers a glimpse into the museum’s collection of historic prints and the chance to consider how these images influence our understanding of the past. The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library is located at 33 Marrett Road, Lexington, MA. The exhibition is on view through November 23, 2019.

Since the 1700s, artists have put their versions of American history on canvas. Enterprising printers duplicated many of these painted images to publish and sell to consumers in the marketplace. Americans’ growing interest in their nation’s story led to a flowering of history painting in the mid-1800s. At the same time, advances in paper and printing technology allowed for more detailed, affordable, and larger prints.

Americans sought depictions of events that evoked national pride or reflected bravery, heroism or persistence—values they admired. This exhibition spans the breadth of America’s beginning, from colonization to the aftermath of the Revolution. Charles Lucy first debuted his work, The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, for the exhibition in 1848. An entrepreneurial publisher issued a print based on Lucy’s painting of the Pilgrims arriving in America. Advertising for this print encouraged consumers to buy it for its historical value, large size, elegance, and beauty. The publishers also stated that their enormous print run of 50,000 allowed them to offer the work at $1.50 a copy, “within the reach of every family in the land.” Both the painting and the print are on display in the exhibition.

Publishers responded to the public’s enthusiasm for American history and its heroes by printing a variety of different historic scenes. Printed decades after the event, the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, was drawn by J. Baker and published by Humphrey Phelps in 1832. The producers included a key to important figures on both sides, as well as the numbers of causalities. More than forty prints, along with related paintings and objects, are on view in “The Art of American History.”

By the mid-1800’s, genre painting—depictions of scenes of everyday life—enjoyed popularity with the American art-viewing public. Nostalgia often colored these scenes. This trend carries over to how artists portrayed historic events and figures. Showing this influence, portrayals of national heroes, like George Washington, change. Along with images celebrating Washington’s contributions as a military leader, artists created scenes of his domestic life. In the 1930s, depictions of Washington attending church or even bowling, as seen in etchings by Ernest David Rote and Childe Hassam, illustrated how a legendary leader participated in day-to-day activities familiar to many Americans.

Today, each painting or print portraying an episode in American history tells a double story of the past—one of the event it depicts and the other of the time it was made. The images in “The Art of American History” serve as rich sources for contemplating how previous generations thought about history-shaping events.

The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library is dedicated to presenting exhibitions on topics in American, Masonic, and fraternal history. The Museum is supported by the Scottish Rite Freemasons in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States. The Museum is located at 33 Marrett Road in Lexington at the corner of Route 2A and Massachusetts Avenue. The Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-4:00 p.m. For further information, contact the Museum at 781 861-6559. www.srmml.org

Media: For more information on the exhibition or to request additional photographs, please contact Lincoln Vamos at 781-465-3331 or lvamos@srmml.org.

Painting, The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America. The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, A. D. 1620, 1868. Charles Lucy (1814–1873). Gift of J. Robert Merrill, 79.77.1. Photograph by David Bohl.