Winner of the 2005 Vasari Award presented by the Dallas Museum of Art for the finest art history book authored by a scholar in Texas

"Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz is an important contribution to the field of nineteenth-century American art history. Randall Griffin argues that nationalistic concerns in art led to a perceptible shift in subject matter in painting. The new paintings displayed a remarkably large range of subjects, as evidenced by works as different as Thomas Eakins’s Swimming Hole and Winslow Homer’s beloved Adirondack pictures. As Griffin describes in cogent detail, they all bear on or issue out of the question of how 'American-ness’ can be construed in relation to the enormous weight of European influence and artistic traditions."—Anthony Lee, Mount Holyoke College.

Randall Griffin’s book examines the ways in which artists and critics sought to forge a new identity for America during the era of growth and change dubbed the Gilded Age because of its leaders’ taste for opulence. Artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz explored alternative ‘American’ themes and styles, but belief in the superiority of European art led them and their audiences to look to the Old World for legitimacy. This rich, never-resolved contradiction between the native and autonomous, on the one hand, and, on the other, the European and borrowed forms the armature of Griffin’s innovative look at how and why the art world became a prime site in the American struggle for identity.

Even as Griffin traces the interplay of issues of nationalism, class, and gender in American culture, he offers insightful readings of key paintings by Eakins and other canonical artists. Further, Griffin shows that by 1900 the nationalist project in art and criticism had helped open the way for American modernism.

Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz will be of importance to all those interested in American culture as well as to specialists in art history and art criticism.