This ambitious catalogue takes on two traditions in American historical scholarship that are seldom reconciled in a satisfactory way. On the one hand, historians have What connection was there between the spirituality of the Hudson River artists long described the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the contentious, expansive age of Andrew Jackson and P. T. Barnum, characterized by a widening market economy, the advent of universal white male suffrage, the beginnings of industrialization, and the resulting realignment of classes that demoted an earlier landed aristocracy to usher in the “era of the common man,” all accompanied by growing regional tensions that would soon result in civil war. Following the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, economic and political power concentrated in New York City, the “Great Emporium” at the forefront of a culture of getting and spending and a major source of financing for the Southern states. On the other hand, students of literature, intellectual history, and art give a different account of this period, based on less worldly concerns. It is the “American Renaissance” in arts and letters, marked by the moody fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the zealous piety of the abolitionist movement, and the writings of the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose spirituality and love of nature is said to have found its pictorial equivalent in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. New York also figures prominently in this account, for while the “American mind” resided in New England, the “national landscape” was the Catskills.

What connection was there between the spirituality of the Hudson River artists and the rough new wealth and power of the metropolis on the Hudson? A recent generation of art historians has begun to answer such questions in studies of local patronage (Alan Wallach), class rivalry (Wallach and William Truettner), regional politics (Angela Miller), and the rise of landscape tourism (Kenneth Myers); Elizabeth Johns has established a similar political context for American genre painting. Now, the authors and curators of Art and the Empire City propose a bold new interpretation of the apparent contradictions of antebellum New York City. They consider the arts in New York as “commodities and spectacles…offered for sale alongside laxatives and fine carriages” (4), testifying both to civilization and purchasing power. The emergence of the Empire City, they argue, coincided with its rise as America’s art center, and the two phenomena resonate through the period’s extravagant furnishings, fashion, photography, and architecture, as well as the serene canvases of the Hudson River School. In this urban culture new wealth accompanied new prominence and ambition in the arts.

The exhibition of Art and the Empire City was an immensely necessary but difficult undertaking, given the traditional expectations of a blue-chip art museum. Its achievements will be valued by historians and art historians alike. Studies of New York’s history have focused in recent years on the period since the Gilded Age, which ushered in the mixture of urban politics, industrial labor, ethnic and racial interaction, commerce, culture, and avant-garde arts that we recognize as modern times. The antebellum era, heretofore of interest for its working-class culture, has not received the same kind of scrutiny. Art historians have not attempted the grand overview that links painting and sculpture to developments in printmaking, photography, decorative arts, and architecture. Could it be that the magnificent excrescences of black walnut sideboards, ceramic “scroddled ware” monuments, hair jewelry, and six-foot-long maps sit uncomfortably alongside the supposedly protoabstract austerity of the period’s landscape painting? The New York Times not only predictably attacked the Metropolitan’s exhibition for smothering the fine art with unneeded historical commentary, but also complained that revered paintings were overshadowed by ugly objects.

The exhibition was part of a significant scholarly undertaking that began with the convening of a series of seminars on antebellum art and culture and culminated in this massive volume. The essays brim with new research as well as new syntheses, and in many cases they offer the first major publication on their respective subjects. The intensity of the arguments and the density of detail make this a difficult book to skim. Most of the essays must build from scratch entire contexts for the production, distribution, and appreciation of work in the media they discuss. We learn about the network of galleries and critics established in these years, the impact of steam power upon silver manufacturing, and the markets for different types of prints. Thanks to these conceptual realignments, seemingly disparate phenomena now snap together and make new sense.

Dell Upton’s introductory essay sets the tone for the volume with its powerful analysis of the new urban culture in which, for the first time in New York, art was made for the open market rather than commissioned privately. Upton pushes back to the antebellum era the dates for a number of modern commercial trends usually associated with a later consumer culture: urban spectacle, shop windows, world’s fairs conceived along the lines of department stores, and the emergence of hierarchies that sought to differentiate fine arts from popular entertainment. That such distinctions did not succeed until closer to 1900 is evidence of the wonderfully hybrid nature of this art world, in which marble sculptures attracted crowds of thousands in touring exhibitions, and a mechanic could win the original paintings of Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life series in a lottery. Venues for exhibitions, we learn from a valuable appendix, ranged from the “Dioramic Institute” and the American and Foreign Snuff Store to Aaron Levy’s auction rooms and the competing National and American Academies of Art and Design.

Upton’s observations on the art made for a striving society lay the groundwork for the detailed case studies that follow. In each, considerations of markets refocus traditional connoisseurial discussions of media, sometimes with startling results. Carrie Rebora Barratt argues that the paintings most admired at that time are the least known today: Religious and literary subjects were regarded more highly than landscape, and German and English artists were exhibited more than French or American ones. With diligence and sly wit, she reconstructs the critical favorites of the 1830s to 1850s. Frederic Edwin Church, John Martin, and a copy after Theodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa make their appearance, but the highest accolades went to a minor Jacques-Louis David pupil, Claude-Marie Dubufe. Barratt suggests that “it may well be that Dubufe was so successful in America primarily because he produced admirable paintings expressing admirable values as opposed to extraordinary paintings expressing indifferent values” (56). In Kevin J. Avery’s essay on landscape and tourism, Church’s grandiloquent paintings take a back seat to their magnificent frames. Essay by essay, the chapters “reframe” their subjects so that porcelain, for example, is now discussed as evidence of literally “acquired taste.”

The book’s provocative thesis, however, does not always hold, as the new conceptual orientation of the introductory essay is not consistently carried through. Several chapters lapse into the dry stylistic analysis of traditional scholarship in the decorative arts. Surely, after engaging a rich context of market forces and cultural backdrop, Catherine Hoover Voorsanger might have had more than this to say about a huge secretary covered in a bilious mahogany veneer: “The circular front feet are unusual, although they have applied rimmed disks, a detail that is associated with New York furniture of the 1830s” (296). Jeff L. Rosenheim’s chapter on photography is replete with technical and business details but takes little advantage of the many recent studies that have related antebellum photography to the very cultural trends that the catalogue aims to address. The chapters on painting, however, while offering splendid insights into the workings of the market, downplay the questions of style and content that have inspired such productive scholarship of late. Avery’s glancing reference to “the tradition of reverence for nature” (122) that informed Hudson River landscapes fails to grapple with their cultural and intellectual complexity. The reader is left wondering why such sophisticated and culturally loaded paintings as Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South are reproduced but not discussed in the text. They certainly figured in the artistic life of the city, but perhaps the authors’ focus on markets is insufficient to do them justice.

These omissions are a pity because, thanks to Upton’s essay and the book’s general thrust, we can now see new significance in all of the works discussed, from the sumptuous luxury objects to the evocative faces that gaze out from portrait photographs. The subject of fashion might be treated in the contexts of debates over the deceptive nature of appearances during a period that threw so many strangers together in cities, or the elaborate street culture of display among “Bowery B’hoys” and “Gals.” But rather than address this literature, Caroline Rennolds Milbank’s essay on dress rehearses a taxonomy of styles in high-end clothing.

Still, the splendid book brings new shape to an understudied era and provides a framework for much future research. In addition to its clearly stated thesis about the mutual significance of the market economy and the arts, it suggests a number of hidden narratives that warrant further investigation: the changing status of mechanics who claimed cultural presence while losing economic power; the importance of Southern and European markets for New York-made goods; and the role of reproductive prints in the economic and critical success of paintings. The high level of scholarship and intellectual rigor will serve as inspiration and challenge. The book is a fitting tribute to the memory of the late Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, who provided the exhibition’s original impetus and who died much too soon after it closed.