"A11 happy families resemble one another," Leo Tolstoy reminds us in Anna Karenina, but certainly nowhere is this universality more apparent than in our collective image of the ideal, happy American family.
See the Mother, beaming and beautiful as she beckons baby to her side to get dressed for play. See the Father, as he returns home after a long hard day at work, greeted at the door by his adoring family -a faithful, loving wife; charming, spotlessly attired children; romping, playful pets. See the cozy upholstered armchair pulled up before a blazing fire, an open prayer book on the table beside it, toys scattered on the floor. See the entire family-grandparents, parents, and children frolicking together on the front lawn or on the beach and at picnic outings. See the exhibition, Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840-1910, at the Margaret wood bury Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, to discover where our sentimental image of ideal American family life originated. Here are depictions of domestic felicity so powerful and profound that they continue to reach across the gulf of a century to color, if not shape, contemporary expectations and emotions concerning the American family.
Is it possible that the Victorians were really so happy at home? Were the good old days as rich, as golden as they are portrayed in this enchanting exhibition of domestic scenes from everyday life in nineteenth-century American genre paintings? Or are our romantic, nostalgic impressions of Victorian families distorted by the complex and chilling prism of late twentieth-century family life? When one in three American marriages ends in divorce and fifty million American mothers with school age children work outside their homes, is it any wonder that we are drawn, as if by an irresistible magnet, to the scene of a calm, serene, happy-looking family gathered around the hearth and enjoying the pleasure of each other's company?
The answers to these questions are discovered in the paintings themselves, according to Lee Edwards, who organized Domestic Bliss for the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York (where the show originated last May) and wrote the catalog that accompanies the exhibition.
"We all want the ideal, so there's a tremendous nostalgia for what went on in the past or what we imagine went on in the past for the kind of stability that is rooted in the home and family life. Our society is so severely fragmented, families are split by distance-we now even have commuter marriages that it's no wonder we pursue the blissful ideal that was endorsed by American-genre painters in the nineteenth century.
"With their primary emphasis on sentimentality and emotion, these images of domestic harmony the happy family with the husband and wife, some young children seated by them or being instructed by them, and then the respectful, loving inclusion of the older family members idealize the family almost to the point of a fantastic myth."
What is ironic, Edwards points out, is that, at the same time these tranquil scenes were being painted, Victorian society was undergoing the strains of tremendous change as America was transformed from an isolated rural and agricultural country into an industrialized nation of cities served by a complex system of transportation, communication, and mass production. With mechanized production
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