The Battle of Bunker Hill

The Revolutionary War had begun in April, 1775, and British troops controlled Boston.  The Americans controlled the surrounding countryside, and they knew that the British wanted to take Charlestown, just across the Charles River from Boston.   On the night of June 16, twelve hundred American troops moved to fortify Bunker’s Hill in Charleston.

Throughout the night, the Americans feverishly dug trenches to protect them if attacked.   At dawn, British General Thomas Gage ordered his ships to fire cannons at the American fortifications.  The cannons failed to hit their target, but Gage sent 2,000 troops across the river anyway.

The Americans were short of gunpowder.  Colonel William Prescott, their commander, ordered them to hold their fire “until you see the whites of their eyes.”  As the British charged, sudden fire from the Americans cut them down.  The British charged a second time and were forced to retreat.  During the third attack, the Americans ran out of gunpowder, and the British took the hill.  But the battle gave hope to the Americans.  The British suffered 1,000 casualties, twice as many as the Americans.  And it was clear that the inexperienced American troops would fight valiantly for their country.

For unknown reasons, the Americans actually fortified and fought for Breed’s Hill instead of Bunker’s Hill.  But the battle was named after the neighboring hill they were sent to defend.

The painting with this post is The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill.   ElementaryHistoryTeacher over at History Is Elementary provides an excellent explanation of the painting and how it relates to the battle here.

Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer is regarded as one of America’s greatest artists. No other American painter has captured the power and beauty of the sea as effectively.


As a child in Massachusetts, Homer knew that he wanted to be an artist. He spent his free time sketching animals and people. When he was 18, he went to work for a lithographer (a printer of pictures).

And in his early 20s, he moved to New York to become a sketch artist for Harper’s Weekly, a popular magazine. Soon Harper’s sent him to sketch the soldiers and battles of the Civil War. After the war, Home taught himself to paint. At first he painted in oils, but later he used watercolors, too. He usually painted fashionable young women, carefree children and simple country scenes.

In the early 1880s, Homer spent time in an English fishing village. There he discovered the sea – the subject to which he would devote the rest of his life. When he returned home, he settled at Prouts Neck, Maine, on a lonely part of the coast. There he created his greatest paintings. Some, such as “Breezing Up,” show a friendly ocean. But many show the sea at its most turbulent, as though in combat with the courageious men who made their living there.

One of Homer’s most dramatic paintings, “The Gulf Stream,” shows sharks circling a boat that has been badly damaged in a storm. A single man lies motionless on the deck.   "The Gulf Stream" is pictured with this article.

Wordless: The Athenaeum

This painting of George Washington is by Gilbert Stuart and is also known as The Athenaeum.
Yes, people realize it is unfinished.

The Athenaeum is the image of Washington we see on the dollar bill. Stuart and his daughters completed over 130 reproductions but the original, seen here, was never completed. The painting hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Don’t get this painting confused with Stuart’s other famous George Washington painting……
the Lansdowne portrait…the one Dolly Madison saved during the War of 1812.

Other bloggers are participating in Wordless Wednesday. You can find them here .

Wordless: Boy Rescued From a Shark

This painting is titled A Youth Rescued From a Shark by John Singleton Copley(1778). It currently hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The painting depicts the rescue of Brook Watson, a British merchant, soldier, and one-time Lord Mayor of London. At the age of 14 Watson was rescued from the shark attack as he was swimming the harbor at Havana, Cuba. He lost his leg from the knee down in the attack, and commissioned the painting to serve as a warning as well as the message that even the severest adversity can be overcome.

Other bloggers are participating in Wordless Wednesday. You can find them here

Wordless: Lander's Peak

This painting is Landers Peak in the Rocky Mountains by Albert Bierstadt, a German-American painter. Bierstadt is known for large landscapes of the American West. In order to fuel his inspiration Bierstadt often traveled with westward expansion expeditions.

Bierstadt’s works are considered to be part of the Hudson River School---a group of painters that used Romantic details and almost glowing light (luminism).

You can see Bierstadt’s complete works here

Find other wordless images published by other bloggers here.

James Whistler

James Whistler believed that art should speak for itself, and that the subject matter of a painting was not important. To underline this point, he called his paintings symphonies, nocturnes, etudes, and arrangements—names usually given to musical works.

His most famous work is a portrait that carefully balances areas of light and dark. He called it “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.” Most people know it by another name: “Whistler’s Mother” seen here with this post.

Born in Massachusetts, Whistler spent much of his youth in Russia, where his father built a railroad for the government. He attended the military academy at West Point, New York, but left to become an artist. He worked as a mapmaker, learning the technique of etching and printmaking.

Then he moved to Paris, where he joined a circle of Impressionists painters. There he began collecting Oriental art, which became a major influence on his work. He moved to London in 1859.

Whistler was famous for his sharp tongue, dandyish dress, and eccentric manner. But he was serious about his art. Many of his etchings and paintings were moody and impressionistic, and his work was often derided.

In 1877, critic John Ruskin accused him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won. In later years, Whistler was acclaimed for his brilliant lithographs and subtle portraits, in which he presented his subjects in silhouette against a black background.

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt lived at a time when women were expected to marry and raise families. They were not supposed to become artists. But Cassatt was determined to be a painter, and she succeeded. She became the first American women to win recognition as an important artist.

Cassatt studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Then she went to Europe to pursue her dream. In 1872, one of her paintings was accepted for exhibition by the French Academy of Fine Arts. She settled in Paris, where she became a lifelong friend and student of the Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas. “How well I remember, “ she recalled, “seeing for the first time Degas’ pastels in the window of a picture dealer. I used to go and flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art.”

Most of Cassett’s paintings were of women or children. Artists at that time usually idealized their subjects. But Cassatt’s paintings showed people as they really looked. Her work became very popular. And when a gallery exhibted her work in 1893, the catalogue noted, “Cassatt is perhaps along with Whistler, the only artist of eminent talent…that America actually possesses.”

Cassatt’s eyesight began to fail when she was about 60. She grew nearly blind, and had to give up painting.

You can find several links regarding this artist at Mary Cassatt Online and this site has a lot to offer from the National Gallery of Art.


There are also several YouTube videos featuring Mary Cassatt’s work (see list here) including this one:

The Ashcan School

In art, the term "school" usually refers to a group of artists who work in similar style. But the painters of the so-called Ashcan School were even more closely bound than that. They all studied under the same teacher, Robert Henri, and were greatly influenced by him. One of his paintings is seen here.
Henri was an Ohio-born artist who painted mainly portraits. He used strong colors and sharp contrasts of light and dark---executed with loose, quickly applied brush strokes---to create a realistic study. He never flattered his subjects, but tried to catch them "to the life". His students---John Sloan, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, George Luks, and George Bellows---used the same spontaneous style to portray real life in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bellows was a talented athlete. He gave up the chance to to become a professional baseball player when he became a serious art student.
They were called the Ashcan School because there was no aspect of city life they wouldn't paint, including the grimy alleys where ashcans were kept. Each artist had his own special interests. Sloan favored bustling street scenes. Shinn loved the theater and circuses. Luks painted colorful characters and the down-and-out, while Bellows often depicted sporting events, especially boxing matches. But the real subject for all the Ashcan School painters was the diverse, vital city itself.

Frederick Remington

A rider clings to a wildly rearing horse. A cavalry unit gallops across the plains. Rough-and-ready cowboys ride full tilt through a frontier town. These scenes of action and adventure come alive in paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington, the best-known artist of the American West.

Remington was a tall, blond New Yorker who studied at Yale and at the New York Art Student League. He made his first trip to the West when he was 19. There, in the rigorous lives of the cowboys, Indians, and frontier soldiers, he found the subject matter for his life’s work. In drawings and paintings, he depicted cattle roundups, campfire scenes, frontier battles, buffalo hunts, and other scenes of western life. Remington was proud of his ablity to depict horses in action. He photographed horses in motion to get the details right. Many of his drawings and paintings were reproduced in magazines and books.

In the 1890s, he turned to sculpture and created magnificent works in bronze.

Remington served as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and he wrote several books. But it was his unique ability to capture the romance and adventure of the West in art that made him famous worldwide.