Paintings of everyday life tell America's story.

• Position: Museums Today

FROM THE DECADE before the Revolution to the start of World War I, many of America's most acclaimed painters captured in their finest works the temperament of their respective eras. They recorded and defined the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915" brings together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic pictures that tell compelling stories of life's tasks and pleasures.

The exhibit features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows, as well as notable works by some of their key colleagues. It examines stories based on familiar experiences and the means by which painters told their stories through their choices of settings, players, action, and various narrative devices. The artists' responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations are examined, as are their evolving styles and standards of storytelling in relation to the themes of childhood, marriage, family, and community; the production and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes towards race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of art-making.

The exhibition is arranged in four chronological sections. The first--Inventing American Stories, 1765-1830--begins with artists who told stories through portraits. Serving their sitters' self-conscious interest in how they appeared in the eyes of others, American portraitists often emulated British compositions. Although these artists focused on individuals and particular locales and relationships, the cleverest of them responded to broader narrative agendas and the natural impulse to tell stories.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In his portrait of his colleague, "Paul Revere" (1768), Copley embedded subtle narrative into a traditional single-figure format, with the silversmith's gestures and gaze conveying volumes about the time in which he lived. As their patrons learned to read portraits for more than likeness and to appreciate artistic license, portraitists began to gratify their sitters by telling subtle personal stories in increasingly elaborate compositions. In his ingenious double-likeness of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788), for instance, Peale...