District of Columbia Art History
with an emphasis on representational art
Introduction
This section of the Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) catalogue Topics in American Art is devoted to the topic "District of Columbia Art History."
Listed after museums are links to online resources outside the TFAO website. Following these resources is information about offline resources including DVDs, paper-printed books, journals and articles. Our goal is to present complete knowledge relating to this section of Topics in American Art.
We recommend that researchers always search within Resource Library for additional material. Please see TFAO's page How to research topics not listed for more information.
(above: Robert Franklin Gates,
Market, 1936, 16.5 x 21.7 inches, Smithsonian American
Art Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)
Museums and other non-profit sources of Resource Library articles and essays:
Click on the name of the source to see individual articles amd essays related to the source. Clicking on titles takes readers directly to the articles and essays. The date at the end of each title is the date of publication in Resource Library.
George Washington University Dimock Gallery
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
National Museum of American Art
National Museum of the American Indian
National Museum of Women in the Arts
United States Capitol Art Collection
(above: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo © 2014 John Hazeltine)
Other online information:
Artist in Exile: The Visual Diary of Baroness Hyde de Neuville is a 2019 exhibit at the New-York Historical Society https://www.nyhistory.org/ which says: "Self-taught and ahead of her time, Anne Marguérite Joséphine Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville (1771-1849) was the first woman artist in America to leave a substantial body of work." Accessed 8/20
A Brief History of the Washington Society of Landscape Painters from The Washington Society of Landscape Painters. Accessed August, 2015.
Gail Rebhan: About Time is a 2023 exhibit at the American University Museum which says: "For better and worse, nothing stays still. DC artist Gail Rebhan (b. 1953) knows that well and this, her first museum retrospective, explores her many different ways over four decades of using and reconfiguring the time-slicing medium of photography to reflect on macro-and-micro-dynamics of interactions inside families -- her own and that of other immigrants -- on the centuries of change in diverse areas of the nation's capital, and on the marks of time revealed on her body (along with periodic attempts to fight it) from young adult, to mother of two sons, then caregiver of an aging father, to the present as she continues making art and living while facing the start of her 7th decade." Accessed 3/24
Good Form, Decorum, and in the Manner: Portraits from the Collections of Washington Print Club Members is a 2020 exhibit at the American University Museum which says: "This exhibition comprises many works that could be thought of as conventional portraits of individuals in a wide range of media, including woodblock and wood engravings, intaglio prints, mezzotints, monoprints, photography, collage, and an assemblage made with found objects. The show also pushes the boundaries of portraiture by including works that capture the likenesses of animals, places, memories, and events." Accessed 10/20
The Long Sixties:Washington (D.C.) Paintings in the Watkins and Corcoran Legacy Collections, 1957-1982 is a 2021 exhibit at the American University Museum which says: "Curator Jack Rasmussen brings us back to The Long Sixties in this four part video series. Produced by Gaby Sosa and Fernando Roch." Includes videos and online catalog. Accessed 11/21
Making Our Mark: Washington Print Club is a 2019 exhibit at the Mitchell Art Gallery, St. John's College which says: "A collective of eight prominent regional artists drawn together through printmaking." Accessed 5/19
Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See is a 2020 exhibit at the American University Museum which says: "He was a muralist, painter, printmaker, draftsman, and professor at the Phillips Gallery School and then American University for over forty years. His watercolors earned him early acclaim, signaled by their inclusion in the very first exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art upon its opening in 1941." Exhibit description includes online catalogue. Accessed 10/20
United States Capitol Campus Art - from from Architect of the Capitol. Accessed August, 2015.
U.S. Senate Art - from U.S. Senate. Accessed August, 2015.
Washington Landscape Club from AskArt.com. Accessed August, 2015.
Works of Art in the United States Capitol Building, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913, from Google Books, including biographies of the artists. This entire book can be read online. Accessed August, 2015.
Mural
Artists Help Beautify Washington, DC. video from Voice of America.
Accessed May, 2015.
Books, listed by year of publication, with most recently published book listed first:
Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington,
D.C., By Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Edwin Harlan Remsberg.
Photographs by Edwin Harlan Remsberg. Contributor Edwin Harlan Remsberg.
Published by John Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 0801858615, 9780801858611.
192 pages. Google Books says: 
"Although
the monuments of Washington, D.C., honor more than two centuries of history
and heroes, five years of that history produced more of the city's public
commemorative sculpture than all the others combined. The heroes of the
Civil War command Washington's choicest vantage points and most visible
parks, lending their names to the city's most familiar circles and squares
-- Scott, Farragut, Logan, Sheridan, Dupont, and others. In Testament to
Union, Kathryn Allamong Jacob tells the stories behind the many District
of Columbia statues that honor participants in the Civil War, predominantly
Union, and testify to their sacrifice and valor. In her introduction, Jacob
puts these monuments in historical context, describing the often bitter
battles over control of historical memory, the postwar monument business
(a lone soldier-in-granite model could cost a community as little as $1,000),
and the rise of the "city beautiful" movement that transformed
Washington. She then offers individual descriptions of forty-one sculptures,
providing a lively and informative guide to some of Washington's most beautiful
and moving works of art.
Organized geographically for easy use on walking or driving tours, the entries begin by listing the subject or title of the memorial along with its sculptor, medium, date, and location. Jacob describes its various elements and symbols, and she notes who commissioned the sculpture, who paid for it (or failed to pay in several cases), and who approved its design and placement. She also includes anecdotes and controversies that bring the monuments and their colorful history more fully to life. Admiral David Farragut's statue, for example, is cast from the propeller of his ship the U.S.S. Hartford, from whose rigging he shouted, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" during the battle of Mobile Bay. At the dedication of Lincoln Park's Emancipation Monument in 1876, the largest assembly of African-American to date, speaker Frederick Douglass shocked white listeners with thinly veiled criticism of the martyred Lincoln. Edwin Remsberg's photographs of the monuments capture striking images of war and sacrifice -- the straining horses and terrified men of the cavalry grouping at the Grant Monument; the vivid tomb effigy of young John Meigs, depicting him as he was found dead in a field; the Pension Building frieze with its hundreds of finely detailed terra cotta soldiers and sailors marching and rowing across the face of the building. Along with swashbuckling generals atop pedestals bristling with cannon, unexpected subjects appear. A statue of John Ericsson, the Swedish-American who designed the Monitor and perfected the screw propeller for the Union Navy, is hidden in a circle of shrubbery beside the Potomac. A bas-relief of twelve nuns dedicated to the memory of various religious orders who nursed the wounded during the Civil War sits beside noisy Rhode Island Avenue. In addition to the enormous white temple to Lincoln on the Mall, four smaller statues of that president can be found in the city where he was assassinated.
Washington's Civil War sculptures bear silent witness to the struggle to preserve the Union. They are the fruit of conscious efforts to shape the nation's memory of that struggle. For tourists and long-time residents, and for anyone interested in the Civil War or public art, Testament to Union is a wonderful guide to these tangible connections to the nation's past and an era when public monuments packed powerful messages." (right: front cover of Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C.,. image courtesy of Google Books)
The Capitol Image: Painters in Washington, 1800-1915, by Andrew S. Cosentino and Henry S. Glassie. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983
"Washington on the Potomac" essay by Linda Crocker Simmons, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1982.
Sculpture and the Federal Triangle: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., October 26, 1979 -January 6, 1980, By George Gurney, National Collection of Fine Arts (U.S., National Collection of Fine Arts (U.S.). Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. 42 pages. Google Books says: "A walking tour of the Federal Triangle, Washington, D.C."
Washington, D.C. Artists Born before 1900: A Biographical Dictionary Washington, D.C.: Privately printed, 1976
Works of Art in Washington, By Leila Mechlin, Washington Society of the Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., Washington Society of the Fine Arts, Published by The Washington Society of the Fine Arts, 1914, Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized Jan 17, 2007, 11 pages
Ph.D. dissertation:
"Washington's First Art Academy: The Corcoran School of Art, 1875-1925," by Allan Thomas Marsh, University of Maryland, 1983
Articles:
Florence S. Berryman, "Artists of Washington" Records of the Columbia Historical Society 50 (1952): 215-33
Josephine Cobb, "The Washington Art Association: An Exhibition Record, 1856-1860," Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington D.C. 63-65 (1966)
Leila Mechlin, "Art Life in Washington," Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington D.C. 24 (1922): 164-91
Gladys Milligan, "The Society of Washington Artists," Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington D.C. 60-62 (1963): 282-88
Marietta Minnegerode, "Art in Washington," Corcoran Art Journal 1 (December, 1892, January-May 1893)
Elizabeth Ellison Newport, "A Group of Washington Artists," Art Interchange 37 (December, 1896): 140-42
"Art and Artists in Washington" National Republican, December 5, 1870
"Art in the District of Columbia" American Journal of Education 19 (1870): 725-73
TFAO extends appreciation to Brett Busang for suggesting information for this page.
Return to Individual States Art History Project
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