Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


DISSERTATION_Amber_Stitt_2_ETD.pdf (4.76 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

American Images of Childhood in an Age of Educational and Social Reform, 1870-1915

Stitt, Amber C
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1364908854

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Art History.
During the period 1870-1915, painters and photographers created some of the most famous contributions to American imagery. More often than not, these images dealt with the extraordinarily complex social issue of children and childhood, and the way that the sentimental value of children evolved alongside a transitioning nation. Post-bellum genre painters portrayed boys as defiant mascots of the nation, in communion with nature, at odds with social institutions like the school. These painters foreran the realist “Ashcan School,” whose paintings of misfit children illustrated the vices of the growing, clashing American city. Yet these were not the only images of children produced in this period. Paintings of the “Genteel Tradition” portrayed pampered children, and their photographic analogue, the “Photo-Secessionists,” attempted to establish a highly artificial rhetoric of the “child-angel.” Often, these discreet artists ironically unmasked the psychological complexity of real, living child models. Finally, documentary reform photographers invented a new, stark aesthetic mode to advocate disenfranchised child laborers. American art about children was not only profuse, but also treated the subject in new and unusual ways that often directly paralleled contemporaneous literature and social commentary. Yet curiously, while psychologists, literary and cultural theorists, and historians have generated a vast body of scholarship on the role of the child in America, their observations never intersect systematically with research on children in American art. This dissertation will attempt to rectify this gap in art historical research. It focuses on the brief but fecund time frame when American artists overwhelmingly depicted children. It discusses children exclusively as a subject, as opposed to the extant survey-oriented studies that sandwich children within a list of disempowered social groups. Simultaneously, I attempt to draw comparisons and contrasts between contemporaneous visual media—paintings, photographs, and drawings. This dissertation, though primarily intended to analyze visual culture at a specific historical moment, is interdisciplinary. By bringing observations from sister disciplines into the field of art history, and studying images side-by-side that are rarely spoken about together, I am hopeful that a more comprehensive understanding of the child in American art and society will emerge.
Henry Adams, Dr. (Advisor)
Jenifer Neils, Dr. (Committee Member)
Gary Sampson, Dr. (Committee Member)
Renee Sentilles , Dr. (Committee Member)
643 p.
American History; American Literature; Art History
Child Studies; Social history; History of American Art; children in American art; Progressive Era; childhood in American art; American painting; American photography; Winslow Homer; Robert Henri; John Singer Sargent; Alfred Stieglitz; Lewis Hine

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Stitt, A. C. (2013). American Images of Childhood in an Age of Educational and Social Reform, 1870-1915 [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1364908854

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Stitt, Amber . American Images of Childhood in an Age of Educational and Social Reform, 1870-1915. 2013. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1364908854.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Stitt, Amber . "American Images of Childhood in an Age of Educational and Social Reform, 1870-1915." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1364908854

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1364908854
9,739
© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.