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"Paint scenes that come home to everybody. That everyone can understand." - William Sidney Mount
When he attended classes at the National Academy of Design, Mount hoped to make his name with HISTORY PAINTING, but he found success after he returned home to rural Long Island, and devoted himself to painting everyday scenes with their pleasant interludes, such as Dancing on the Burn Floor ( 1831 ). Many of his pictures pose problems of interpretation for art historians. This is true of The Power of Music (1847): A black man stands outside the barn door, listening to the music, clearly isolated from the music making white trio inside. Clues to the painting's possible hidden meaning, or moral, are a jug, perhaps of spirits, and an ax by the outsider's feet, while a pitchfork stands just inside the barn door. Exactly what these details signify is ambiguous, and the extent to which Mount's apparently sympathetic portrayal of African-Americans is more truly demeaning and stereotypical is also a matter of discussion. Where one interpreter may see "a wholesome simplicity, even virtue ... truly American," another will note the picture's racism. In all cases, as was true of Northern European genre paintings of the 16th century, Mount's vignettes have underlying messages that were more quickly apparent to his contemporaries than they are to us today. Mount pioneered in American GENRE painting, but was soon followed by others, foremost among them Francis William Edmonds (1806-1863) and Richard Caton Woodville ( 1825-1855 ).
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