American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings - of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk - served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation - arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time.
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