Francis W Edmonds: American Master in the Dutch Tradition

Francis William Edmonds (1806-1863) was an American Painter of considerable repute in the first half of the nineteenth century. By profession a banker, Edmonds was also a talented artist. Like several other painters of his time he took inspiration from seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, echoing its meticulous rendering of the everyday world. Like the Dutch masters, he treats in his genre pieces not merely the incidental moment, but the human condition. His work is infused with a significant depth of feeling, becoming more poignant and profound in his most mature efforts. Edmonds also directs our attention to the broader social context behind these slivers of everyday life. His art probes human relationships; it places the individual within a society that commingled much of the optimism of the Jacksonian era with the harsher realities of unsettled financial times and with politically divisive issues such as racial equality. In this book H. Nichols B. Clark traces Edmonds' career as a painter, placing him in the context of American genre painting and investigating his sources in Dutch and British art. Clark brings to light material that has descended in the artist's family and publishes here for the first time many of the preliminary oil sketches for Edmonds' paintings. He also defines Edmonds' very considerable role in several of the pioneering art organizations of nineteenth-century America. Illustrated with 16 color plates and 106 black and white figures.