Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Thomas Hood was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, had lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson. Hood was the father of the playwright and humorist Tom Hood (1835–1874) and the children's writer Frances Freeling Broderip (1830–1878).
Vauxhall Bridge is a Grade II* listed steel and granite deck arch bridge in central London. It crosses the River Thames in a southeast–northwest direction between Vauxhall on the south bank and Pimlico on the north bank. Opened in 1906, it replaced an earlier bridge, originally known as Regent Bridge but later renamed Vauxhall Bridge, built between 1809 and 1816 as part of a scheme for redeveloping the south bank of the Thames. The bridge was built at a location in the river previously served by a ferry.
Battersea Bridge is a five-span arch bridge with cast-iron girders and granite piers crossing the River Thames in London, England. It is situated on a sharp bend in the river, and links Battersea south of the river with Chelsea to the north. The bridge replaced a ferry service that had operated near the site since at least the middle of the 16th century.
Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London, between Blackfriars Bridge and Hungerford Bridge and Golden Jubilee Bridges. Its name commemorates the victory of the British, Dutch and Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Thanks to its location at a strategic bend in the river, the bridge offers good views of Westminster, the South Bank and the London Eye to the west, and of the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
George Frederic Watts was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.
The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
The Bridge of Sighs is a bridge in Venice. Bridge of Sighs may also refer to:
"London" is a poem by William Blake, published in Songs of Experience in 1794. It is one of the few poems in Songs of Experience that does not have a corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence. Blake lived in London so writes of it as a resident rather than a visitor. The poems reference the "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul". The "Songs of Innocence" section contains poems which reference love, childhood and nature. Critics have suggested that the poems illustrate the effects of modernity on people and nature, through the discussion of dangerous industrial conditions, child labour, prostitution and poverty.
William Miller was a Scottish Quaker line engraver and watercolourist from Edinburgh.
The Lady of Shalott is a painting of 1888 by the English painter John William Waterhouse. It is a representation of the ending of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1832 poem of the same name. Waterhouse painted three versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915. It is one of his most famous works, which adopted much of the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though Waterhouse was painting several decades after the Brotherhood split up during his early childhood.
The Awakening Conscience (1853) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the English artist William Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which depicts a woman rising from her position in a man's lap and gazing transfixed out the room's window.
"The Bridge of Sighs" is an 1844 poem by Thomas Hood concerning the suicide of a homeless young woman who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge in London.
Alice Ayres was an English nursemaid honoured for her bravery in rescuing the children in her care from a house fire. Ayres was a household assistant and nursemaid to the family of her brother-in-law and sister, Henry and Mary Ann Chandler. The Chandlers owned an oil and paint shop in Union Street, Southwark, then just south of London, and Ayres lived with the family above the shop. In 1885 fire broke out in the shop, and Ayres rescued three of her nieces from the burning building, before falling from a window and suffering fatal injury.
Hope is a Symbolist oil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining. The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous. While his use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked the painting. Hope proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its message. Reproductions in platinotype, and later cheap carbon prints, soon began to be sold.
Past and Present is the title usually given to the series of three oil paintings made by Augustus Egg in 1858, which are designed to be exhibited together as a triptych. When first exhibited at Royal Academy in 1858 the paintings were untitled, but accompanied by a fictional quotation from a diary, "August the 4th – Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!".
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott is a painting by John William Waterhouse completed in 1915. It is the third painting by Waterhouse that depicts a scene from the Tennyson poem, "The Lady of Shalott". The title of the painting is a quotation from the last two lines in the fourth and final verse of the second part of Tennyson's poem:
What the Water Gave Me is an oil painting by Frida Kahlo that was completed in 1938. It is sometimes referred to as What I Saw in the Water.
After the Deluge, also known as The Forty-First Day, is a Symbolist oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, first exhibited as The Sun in an incomplete form in 1886 and completed in 1891. It shows a scene from the story of Noah's Flood, in which after 40 days of rain Noah opens the window of his Ark to see that the rain has stopped. Watts felt that modern society was in decline owing to a lack of moral values, and he often painted works on the topic of the Flood and its cleansing of the unworthy from the world. The painting takes the form of a stylised seascape, dominated by a bright sunburst breaking through clouds. Although this was a theme Watts had depicted previously in The Genius of Greek Poetry in 1878, After the Deluge took a radically different approach. With this painting he intended to evoke a monotheistic God in the act of creation, but avoid depicting the Creator directly.
