This report is a case study of the presentation of craft at the Renwick Gallery, the craft museum of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). The Renwick, founded in 1976, is a curatorial department of SAAM, focusing in modern and contemporary American craft. Through an examination of the museum’s galleries and exhibitions, interviews with staff, and an analysis of educational programming, this thesis explores how the Renwick defines craft implicitly and explicitly. Giving a context for this study is a history of the Renwick Gallery, as well as history of craft and its definitions. With these histories as background, the ways that the Renwick, and thus its visitors, understand craft is explored. The qualities specific to craft in the literature and manifest at the Renwick are examined in order to determine how they influence the presentation of craft at the Renwick. / text

This dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue. / text

In 1800, Gilbert Stuart began three paintings of his friend, republican writer, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton--the Worcester, Winterthur, and Boston portraits. While Morton has been remembered more for a tragic personal family scandal than for her literary endeavors, Stuart's provocative images acknowledged her as both a poet and an intellect. His portraits presented a progressive and potentially controversial interpretation of his sitter--the lovely and learned Morton--by prioritizing the writer's life of the mind rather than her socially prescribed life in the world. This study reconstructs the circumstances by which Stuart composed the group of Morton paintings that culminate in his unorthodox Worcester rendering through which he ultimately depicted Morton as the first woman of ideas in American art. Supported by close readings of her work, this dissertation illuminates both the course and depth of the exceptional personal and professional relationship between Morton and Stuart. The paths of the two republican figures crossed at several historic junctures and is highlighted by the interconnectivity of their work. Most significantly, the Stuart portraits represent an ideal lens through which to view Morton's life and work as well as to follow the Boston native's transformation into one of America's earliest women of ideas. / text

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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2003. / "A thesis submitted in full completion of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Cultural Histories and Futures, University of Western Sydney" Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Justin Schorr. Dissertation Committee: William Mahoney. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 327-329).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Justin Schorr. Dissertation Committee: William C. Sayres. Bibliography: leaves 156-163.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2002. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-256).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Richard Shiff. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Ann E. Gibson, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.