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Inspired by: William Sidney Mount, Painter’s Triumph

Mount started his career as a sign painter, but quickly switched to portraits and historical paintings. When later he transitioned to rural scenes, he found his niche, becoming America’s first major genre painter. Many of his works were engraved and distributed in the US as well as Europe giving him wide recognition.

He was born and died in Setauket, on the north shore of Long Island. There he sketch-ed extensively in notebooks and painted plein-air oil sketches, devising a studio-wagon in which he travelled all over the island. Many of his paintings include vividly realistic images of his friends and neighbors. His personal belief regarding his work, "Never paint for the few but for the many," gave average Americans the chance to view themselves, for the first time, as subjects of art. He painted Painter’s Triumph when he was 31 and used himself as the model for the artist. The characterization of the gap-toothed, awestruck farmer is comical, but he also pokes fun at himself in this spoof of the artistic personality.

Although he was an accomplished painter, he had many other talents, such as playing the fiddle. Born into a musical family, Mount’s preoccupation with American indigenous folk music became both a hobby and an important artistic muse. He wrote and published quite a few Fiddle tunes. He also designed and patented a novel type of violin, which he called "The Cradle of Harmony."

See original: bit.ly/3TBvMVi

Inspired by George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

Except for three months of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bingham was self-taught. He began his career as a portrait painter, which was his money maker all through his career. But where he made his mark was genre painting. He was one of the most important American painters of genre subjects in the 19th century. Working before America’s vastness was made accessible by roads and railways, Bingham found his subjects in the boatmen and trappers who populated the Missouri and the Mississippi, the great rivers of his home state. Through these subjects he captured a taste of life in the West. The Jolly Flatboatmen is from his series depicting life on the river. It is among the first distinctly American paintings that capture the allure of Western expansion during the mid-19th century.Several New York businessmen formed the American Art Union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting, and held a lottery for their members to decide who took the painting home. They paid Bingham $290 for the Floatmen and gave it to Benjamin van Schaick, a New York city grocer. The total cost to the winner was the $5 he paid for his membership. In 1986 it was sold for $6 million, a record-breaking auction price. The American Art Union produced a large mezzotint that was distributed to its 10,000 members throughout the country, This immediately made it one of the best-known works of art of its era. Some 18,000 were circulated to hang in American homes and places of business. In today’s terms, it went viral.