Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
   In the 1830s, genre paintings—paintings of subjects from everyday life—rose in demand with middle-class Americans. If they could not afford paintings, ordinary citizens for a modest sum could acquire engravings made after original works of art. Publishers of engravings therefore coveted paintings they felt would sell, and painters whose works garnered widespread appeal could make a living from their efforts. Successful artists knew how to orchestrate detail and expressions to tell a good story. Often they embedded in paintings of commonplace activities veiled references to current politics or other topical subjects, creating works that spoke to audiences of varying sophistication. The rise of national consciousness made subjects deemed quintessentially American particularly desirable.
   Some of the most skilled genre painters in the country hailed from the West. Two painters who worked in Cincinnati, James Henry Beard and Lilly Martin Spencer, were especially noteworthy in their day. Domestic life, as depicted in Procter & Gamble’s The Dogged Class, was Spencer’s forte. Spencer was the most celebrated professional woman painter in mid-nineteenth-century America. Adroitly, she took her own experiences for inspiration, realizing that many viewers could relate to them. As a young girl, Spencer had come to Cincinnati determined to study painting and benefited from Beard’s proximity. Beard reigned as the leading portraitist in the city and later specialized in rendering animals. His greatest contributions, however, are without dispute his genre paintings of the 1840s. North Carolina Emigrants is among the most complex; its rich narrative details evoke the excruciating uncertainties of moving one’s family to unknown territory—a reality of the American experience. After establishing careers in the West, both Spencer and Beard sought greener pastures in New York City. Like many painters who made names in Cincinnati, both had developed the skills here to compete in the East.
Lilly Martin Spencer (1822–1902)
The Dogged Class, 1885
oil on canvas
36 x 48 1/4 in.