Many thanks to Joy Sperling and Alan Wallach who read and commented on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Mount's diary, February 1854, in Frankenstein, Alfred, William Sidney Mount (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), 165Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Frankenstein, Mount).

2. Frankenstein, , Mount, 29Google Scholar.

3. See Moffatt, Frederick C., “Barnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount's Power of Music” Winterthur Portfolio 29 (Spring 1994): 19–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colbert, Charles, “Fair Exchange No Robbery: William Sidney Mount's Comment on Modern Times,” American Art 8 (Summer 1994): 29–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colbert, Charles, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 252Google Scholar; and Johnson, Deborah J., William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life, exh. cat. (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. Keyes, Donald, “William Sidney Mount,” American Art Review 10 (12 1998): 146Google Scholar.

5. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by William Sidney Mount 1807–1868, exh. cat. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum Press, 1942)Google Scholar; Museum, Suffolk, The Mount Brothers: An Exhibition, exh. cat. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Suffolk Museum at Stony Brook, 1947)Google Scholar; Cowdrey, Bartlett and Williams, Hermann Warner Jr, William Sidney Mount, 1807—1868: An American Painter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944)Google Scholar; Frankenstein, Alfred, Painter of Rural America: William Sidney Mount, exh. cat. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Suffolk Museum at Stony Brook; Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1968)Google Scholar; and Frankenstein, Mount.

6. Hills, Patricia, The Painter's America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of America Art, 1974), 12Google Scholar.

7. Zakon, Ronnie L., The Artist and the Studio in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, exh. cat. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978), 13Google Scholar.

8. Cikovsky, Nicolai Jr, introduction to Richard Gregg, The Artist's Studio in American Painting, 1840–1983, exh, cat. (Allentown, Pa.: Allentown Art Museum, 1983)Google Scholar, n.p.

9. Oedel, William T. and Gernes, Todd S., “The Painter's Triumph: William Sidney Mount and the Formation of a Middle-Class Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 23 (Summer/Autumn 1988): 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Burns, Sarah, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 172–73Google Scholar.

11. Doezema, Marianne and Milroy, Elizabeth, eds., Reading American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 128–49Google Scholar; Johns, Elizabeth, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 42Google Scholar; Danly, Susan, Telling Tales: Nineteenth-Century Narrative Painting from the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1991), 17–18Google Scholar; and Staiti, Paul, Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233–36Google Scholar.

12. Johnson, , William Sidney Mount, 49–50Google Scholar.

13. Danly, Susan, “The Carey Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,” Antiques 140 (11 1991): 842Google Scholar. On Carey's publishing, see Ballinger, Grady W., “Carey and Hart,” in American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899, Part 1: A-M, ed. Dzwonkoski, Peter, vol. 49 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), 80–81Google Scholar; and Ginsberg, Louis, A. Hart, Philadelphia Publisher (1829–1854) (Petersburg, Va.: Louis Ginsberg, 1972)Google Scholar.

14. On gift books, see Thompson, Ralph, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1825–1865 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1936; rept. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, David S., “American Painting in Early Nineteenth-Century Gift Books,” American Quarterly 7 (Winter 1955): 345–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowland, Benjamin, “Popular Romanticism: Art and the Gift Books,” Art Quarterly 20 (Winter 1957): 364–81Google Scholar; and Baumgardner, Georgia Brady, “The Popularization of Gentility: Illustrations in American Literary Annuals,” in The Documented Image, ed. Weisberg, Gabriel P. and Dixon, Laurinda (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 13–26Google Scholar.

15. Frankenstein, , Mount, 19, 49, 75–78Google Scholar; and Cassedy, David and Schrott, Gail, William Sidney Mount: Works in the Collection of The Museums at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1983), 19Google Scholar.

16. Danly, , “Carey Collection,” 839, 841–42Google Scholar. On Carey's collection, also see Goodyear, Frank, Beneficent Connoisseurs, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1974)Google Scholar; and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Catalogue of the “Carey Collection” and a Loan Collection of Engravings, etc., exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Collins for Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1879)Google Scholar.

17. Danly, , “Carey Collection,” 842Google Scholar. Johnson, notes Mount's frequent “assimilation of American genre types into European classical models” (William Sidney Mount, 27, 42)Google Scholar.

18. Johnson, , William Sidney Mount, 56Google Scholar; Cowdrey, Mary Bartlett, comp., National Academy of Design Exhibition Records, 1826–1860 (New York: Little and Ives for the New-York Historical Society, 1943), 2: 42Google Scholar; Yarnall, James L. and Gerdts, William H., The National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues from the Beginning through 1876 Centennial Year (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 4:2503Google Scholar; and Rutledge, Anna Wells, ed., Cumulative Record of the Exhibition Catalogues: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1807–1870 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955), 147Google Scholar.

19. Rutledge, , Pennsylvania Academy, 147Google Scholar; and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Catalogue of the Carey Collection, 4.

20. Frankenstein, , Mount, 29, 249Google Scholar.

21. On Mount's studio, see Jones, W. Alfred, “A Sketch of the Life and the Character of William Sidney Mount,” American Whig Review 14 (08 1851): 126Google Scholar; and “William S. Mount,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 4, no. 9 (12 1851): 150Google Scholar. Mount's diary (November 25, 1847), in Frankenstein, (Mount, 181)Google Scholar, reports: “In my practice I invariably turn my pictures round to the wall after I have done painting.” Margaret V. Wall, curator at the Suffolk Museum, stated, “The Melville Collection, which is housed in this museum, owns the easel portrayed in ‘The Painter's Triumph’” (Wall to Barbara Roberts, July 18, 1947, in William Sidney Mount, The Painter's Triumph file, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).

22. Mount's diary (October 28, 1859), in Frankenstein, (Mount, 344)Google Scholar, states, “Mr Leutze said I should stand up while painting — better for health.”

23. Regional types first appeared in New York City during the 1820s, when Mount lived there and was involved in theater. Mount's uncle, Micah Hawkins, with whom he lived in New York, was the composer of the first successful American opera, The Saw Mill; or, a Yankee Trick, and was instrumental in defining Yankee theatrical types. For Mount's interest in types, see Buckley, Peter G., “‘The Place to Make an Artist Work’: Micah Hawkins and William Sidney Mount in New York City,” in Catching the Tune: Music and William Sidney Mount, exh. cat., ed. Armstrong, Janice Gray (Stony Brook, N.Y: Museums at Stony Brook, 1984), 24Google Scholar; Johns, Elizabeth, “The Farmer in the Works of William Sidney Mount,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Summer 1986): 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burns, Sarah, “Yankee Romance: The Comic Courtship Scene in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” American Art Journal 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 57–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burns, Pastoral Inventions; and Johns, American Genre Painting. Johnson stated that Mount's neighbor, William S. Williamson, modeled for the farmer, based on a Williamson family account book entry that she dates to June 1838 (William Sidney Mount, 100 n. 106Google Scholar). However, Laurence W. Ehrhardt dated the entry to June 7, 1839, and believes it was for “militia sketches” that Mount was working on that year (“Colonel William Satterly Williamson and Family: Neighbors of William Sidney Mount,” in William Sidney Mount: Family, Friends, and Ideas, ed. Kaplan, Elizabeth Kahn [Setauket, N.Y.: Three Villages Historical Society, 1999], 36Google Scholar), although he noted that Williamson and Mount spent much time together in 1838 (35–36).

24. McClellan, Elisabeth, Historic Dress in America, 1607–1870 (New York: Blom, 1969), 397Google Scholar; and Burns, , “Yankee Romance,” 67Google Scholar.

25. Mount's Uncle Micah is often described as the archetypal romantic artist, and Mount read stories of painters' lives rife with such stereotypes (see Museum, Suffolk, The Mount Brothers, 12Google Scholar). On mid-19th-century awareness of the romantic artist type, see Roark, Elisabeth L., “Artist as Subject: Images of Artists in American Painting, 1830–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1991), ch. 1Google Scholar. On European precedents for depictions of romantic genius, see Stein, Joanna, “The Image of the Artist in France: Artists' Portraits and Self-Portraits Around 1800 (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1982)Google Scholar; and Tscherny, Nadia, “Beyond Likeness: Late Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture and the Origins of Romanticism” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1986)Google Scholar.

26. Harris, Neil, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 218–51Google Scholar; Zessin, Bruce Delmar, “Images of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1975)Google Scholar; Fay, Stephanie Wasielewski, “American Pictorial Rhetoric: Describing Works of Art in Fiction and Art Criticism, 1820–1875” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar; and Beebe, Maurice, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

27. Intensity of gaze and breadth of forehead were well-known signifiers of genius. “Portrait Painting” (Crayon 3, pt. 1 [01 1856]: 26)Google Scholar noted, “when familiar with the works of geniuses, we wish to view their portraits, to look upon the grand and expansive foreheads — the deep mysterious eyes — the expressive mouths — in fine, we want reverentially to gaze upon the exteriors of intellect.” On romantic definitions of the artist's superiority, see Williams, Raymond, “The Romantic Artist,” ch. 2 in Culture and Society, 1790–1950 (1958; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Becker, George, The Mad Genius Controversy: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978)Google Scholar. On artists' self-fashioning, see Brooke, Xanthe, Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artist's Self-Portraits, exh. cat. (Liverpool, U.K.: Walker Art Gallery, 1995)Google Scholar, and Jones, Amelia, “‘Clothes Make the Man’: The Male Artist as Performative Function,” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 18–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which address 19th-century European artists. On late-19th-century and early-20th-century American artists, see Burns, Sarah, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. On mid-19th-century American artists, see Roark, , “Artist as Subject,” ch. 1Google Scholar.

28. Tupper, Jack, “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist, no. VII,” Crayon 3 (02 1856): 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Genius and Hair,” Home Journal, 07 22, 1848Google Scholar.

29. H. F., , “The World of Science and Art. The National Academy of Design,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 728Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 728. On Briggs, see Taylor, Joshua, William Page: An American Titian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 27, 40–49, 73Google Scholar; McCoy, Garnett, “‘I am right and you are wrong’: Letters of Advice to an Artist of the 1840s,” Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 4 (1988): 15–21Google Scholar; and Miller, Perry, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wit in the Era of Poe and Melville, 1833–1857 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956)Google Scholar.

31. H. F., , “The World of Science and Art: The National Academy,” New World 6 (05 20, 1843): 604Google Scholar; H. F., , “The World of Science and Art: The National Academy of Design,” New World 6 (06 10, 1843): 693–96Google Scholar; H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 727–29Google Scholar; H. F., , “The World of Science and Art: The National Academy,” New World 7 (07 15, 1843): 58–60Google Scholar; and H. F., , “The World of Science and Art: The Rejected Picture,” New World 6 (05 6, 1843): 545–46Google Scholar.

32. H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 728Google Scholar.

33. H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 7 (07 15, 1843): 59Google Scholar; H. F., , “Rejected Picture,” New World 6 (05 20, 1843): 545Google Scholar; and H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 727, 728Google Scholar.

34. S. W., , “‘H. F.’ and the National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 729Google Scholar.

35. Much of the following is indebted to Christine Stansell and Sean Wilentz, “Cole's America: An Introduction,” and Wallach, Alan, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” from Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, exh. cat., ed. Truettner, William H. and Wallach, Alan (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1994), 3–21 and 23–111Google Scholar.

36. The quote on “these motley crowds” is from “American Art-Union,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 15 (11 25, 1848): 19Google Scholar. Briggs's quote is from H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 727Google Scholar. “Let the aim” is from [Minot, W. Jr], “Review of The Builder's Guide, Illustrated by Sixty-six Engravings by Asher Benjamin,” North American Review 52 (04 1841): 309Google Scholar. See also Daniel Huntington, introduction to Ludlow, , A General View of the Fine Arts, Critical and Historical (New York: G. R Putnam, 1851)Google Scholar. This idea registered in fiction as well (see Willis, Nathaniel Parker, Paul Fane; or Parts of a Life Else Untold, a Novel [New York: Scribner's, 1857], 38Google Scholar). The comment on Mount's “superior talents” is from “The Fine Arts,” New York Mirror, 06 13, 1835, 395Google Scholar.

37. “Life in America” is from “The Fine Arts in America,” 4th ser. Christian Examiner 39, no. 4 (11 1845): 329Google Scholar. The second quote is from W., , “Development of Nationality in American Art,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 4, no. 9 (12 1851): 137CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This was a pervasive theme in midcentury critical writing. Articles that address this issue include “Fine Arts,” Putnam's Monthly Magazine 1 (06 1853): 703Google Scholar; “American Arts and American Arms,” Graham's American Monthly Magazine 44 (01 1854): 93–95Google Scholar; “The Representative Art,” Atlantic Monthly 5 (06 1860): 687Google Scholar; and Sturgis, Russell, “The Conditions of Art in America,” North American Review 102 (01 1866): 16–23Google Scholar. A contrasting point of view is “Something About Our Painters,” American Review: A Whig Journal 4 (07 1846): 181Google Scholar.

38. Mount's diary, February 1848, 17, and August 29, 1846, and February 1, 1847, in Frankenstein, , Mount, 9, 143, 172Google Scholar; and Brooklyn Museum of Art, Catalogue, 8Google Scholar.

39. Frankenstein, , Mount, 119, 187–88, 234Google Scholar; and William Sidney Mount to George P. Morris, in Frankenstein, , Painter of Rural America, 38Google Scholar.

40. Wallach, , “Thomas Cole,” 33–34Google Scholar. Williams's “The Romantic Artist,” regarding the radical changes in the ideas of art, the artist, and their place in society, informed my conclusions here, although Williams addressed English writers of a slightly earlier period.

41. Quoted in Wallach, , “Thomas Cole,” 47Google Scholar.

42. Jones, , “A Sketch,” 124Google Scholar.

43. Kelly, Franklin, “Mount's Patrons,” in Johnson, , William Sidney Mount, 109–128Google Scholar. Also see Johns, American Genre Painting (passim) on the implications of typing in genre painting, which she argued is a vehicle to negotiate differences in class, race, and gender, usually reinforcing an urban viewers' sense of superiority over the “other.”

44. Kelly, “Mount's Patrons,” 109; and Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Schnapper, Dominique, The Love of Art: European Museums and Their Public, trans. Beattie, Caroline and Merriman, Neil (Les Editions de Minuit, 1969: rept. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

45. Mascetti, Daniela and Triossi, Amanda, Earrings from Antiquity to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 7, 67–72Google Scholar; and Picken, Mary Brooks, The Fashion Dictionary (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1957), 109Google Scholar.

46. Exodus 21:6 states that when a Hebrew slave declines to leave his master at the end of his six-year term of indenture, his master “shall bring him to the door, unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him forever.” See also Pfeiffer, Charles, Vos, Howard F., and Rea, John, eds., Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia (Chicago: Moody Press, 1975), 1: 484Google Scholar.

47. H. F., , “National Academy,” New World 6 (06 17, 1843): 728Google Scholar.

48. Johnson, , William Sidney Mount, 24, 33Google Scholar. Moffat, (“Barnburning and Hunkerism”) also bases some of his conclusions about The Power of Music on a tiny detail in the paintingGoogle Scholar.

49. Harwood, Andrew Allen, “The Painter's Study,” in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1840, ed. Leslie, Miss (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1839), 218Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., 217, 219.

51. Ibid., 219.

52. Ibid., 217.

53. Burns, , Pastoral Inventions, 170–73, 161Google Scholar.

54. See Moffat, “Barnburning and Hunkerism”; Colbert, “Fair Exchange No Robbery”; Colbert, A Measure of Perfection; and Wunderlich, Roger, “William Sidney Mount's Split Personality: Artistically Forward, Politically Backward,” in Kaplan, , William Sidney Mount, 41—43Google Scholar.

55. Frankenstein, , Mount, 9Google Scholar.