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Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Wolff, Justin. "Soldiers, Sharps, and Shills: Richard Caton Woodville and Antebellum Genre Painting," Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, April 1999.
This dissertation investigates the work of the antebellum genre painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825-1855). I combine social history and the analysis of material culture to deconstruct Woodville’s narratives and contradict facile locutions attached to genre painting. Rather than look frankly at “everyday life,” Woodville denied its actuality and studied the messy facts of social life in Baltimore from oblique perspectives. Woodville’s paintings circumscribe antebellum ideologies but do not present them in tidy packages. Like Melville, Woodville obscured his subjects, including race, the Mexican War, the penny press, and confidence games, with material excess and overwrought stylings. Woodville, I decide, assumed the subversive personality of a shill, a swindler who counterfeits conformity.
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