Art for the Middle Classes
Art for the Middle Classes
America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s
How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books or catalogs from art-union membership organizations).
Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and Sartain’s Union Magazine included two to three fine art engravings monthly, “tipped in” to the fronts of the magazines, and designed for pull-out and display. Featuring the work of a fledgling group of American artists who chose American rather than European themes for their paintings, these magazines were crucial to the distribution of American art beyond the purview of the East Coast elite to a widespread middle-class audience. Contributions to these magazines enabled many American artists and engravers to earn, for the first time in the young nation’s history, a modest living through art.
Author Cynthia Lee Patterson examines the economics of artistic production, innovative engraving techniques, regional imitators, the textual “illustrations” accompanying engravings, and the principal artists and engravers contributing to these magazines.
Cynthia Lee Patterson’s comprehensive Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s studies the ‘embellishments’—the hundreds of engravings and illustrations that provided art to eager middle-class readers of the ‘Philadelphia Pictorials,' the five monthly magazines that reigned supreme in the US in the 1840s. Drawing on archival materials concerning the relationships among editors, artists, and writers, the nature of the reading audiences, new technologies of image reproduction, and the economics of distribution patterns and practices, Patterson argues that these periodical embellishments, virtually ignored in histories of art, are artifacts of broad historical, literary, and artistic significance. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Art for the Middle Classes is an essential contribution to the fields of book history, periodicals, and American cultural history.
Recent historians of antebellum America have produced many splendid studies of the popular arts, printing technology, publishing economics, magazine journalism, and middle-class consumer culture. Art for the Middle Classes is distinctive and extraordinarily useful because it integrates all of these strains of historical research—and more. It is a wide-ranging, meticulously researched, and wonderfully readable evocation of popular magazine art in 1840s America.
Cynthia Lee Patterson is assistant professor of English at University of South Florida Polytechnic. Her articles have appeared in American Periodicals, Journal of American History, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
