Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States

Cloth $45.00 (9780691153209) Rebecca Bedell’s splendid book about the central place of sentimentality in American art from the revolutionary era to the First World War seems surprisingly timely in the age of social distancing. A schoolteacher delivers her lesson to small children in a one-room country schoolhouse, the blank chalkboard against which she is framed suggesting the strict limits of opportunity available to rural, working-class women in the postwar world. In other works, Homer gives us a close-up view of a black bass hooked on a fisherman’s line and an aerial view of a red fox pursued in a desolate winter landscape by predatory crows who hover over him, awaiting a fatal misstep in the snow. To demonstrate, Bedell provides an astute reading of Sargent’s early masterpiece The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), a group portrait of four sisters, ages four, eight, twelve, and fourteen, posed variously in their starchy white pinafores and accoutered by a rug, a doll, a mirror, and two large Japanese vases in a Parisian apartment.