Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States

(Hardback)

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A bold new view of sentimental art's significance in American visual culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century In Moved to Tears, Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, Bedell argues that major American artists-from John Trumbull and Charles

Reviews

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"
"This is a must-read for art historians, museum curators and those who are studying to enter these fields, as a buyer or a viewer might ask about it after this read (because the subject is particularly communicative)." * Pennsylvania Literary Journal *
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Bedell shows how subtly and certainly sentimentalism pervades the work of nineteenth-century American artists. She shows that sentimentalism, by pulling on heartstrings, by creating sympathetic ties, was a force that artists used to their own ends as they went about their work of making appealing art.

Author Bio

Rebecca Bedell is associate professor of art and chair of the Art Department at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 18251875 (Princeton). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.