Celebrating the Common Man.

Genre painting, which focuses on scenes from everyday life, was a strong force in American art during the nineteenth century. By the 1840s it rivaled portrait and landscape painting in popularity. Its practitioners ignored specific names and places in favor of depicting general, everyday occurrences. While there were exceptions, most genre scenes conveyed an optimistic or sympathetic view of American life. A particularly favored subject was rural America, especially the hardworking, rustic lifestyle of the farmer. With industrialization slowly changing the face of America, genre artists nostalgically captured the fading heritage of rural America. William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) preserved one country tradition in The Banjo Player (1858), while Eastman Johnson's The Old Stage Coach (1871) was painted as railroads expanded nationwide, replacing that older mode of travel. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was the first important genre painter of the...