Art History Book List ·

A Stitch in Time

The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America

Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework — primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States — made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America.…

Available January 2014 (est.)

San Rock Art

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century.…

The Engraving Trade in Early Cincinnati

With a Brief Account of the Beginning of the Lithographic Trade

The Engraving Trade in Early Cincinnati examines the vibrant engraving industry that helped fuel the growth of the “Queen City” in the nineteenth century. Cincinnati’s influence as the midwestern center for the print and engraving trade and its key position on the Ohio River played a crucial role in the development of print arts throughout the region.…

Midwest Modern

The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit

Midwest Modern: The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit is the first book showcasing the work of an important modernist printmaker.An Ohio artist, Hewit (1903-1984), who came of age in the 1920s, was well aware of European modernism and other contemporary trends and worked in both representational and abstract styles.…

Philena’s Friendship Quilt

A Quaker Farewell to Ohio

Chenoweth’s research to discover the story behind a Quaker signature quilt made in Columbiana County, Ohio, in 1853 revealed not only the identity of the quilt recipient and details of her life and community, but also a striking feature of the quilt itself—a “hidden” design element created by the deliberate placement of names on the quilt’s surface. In Philena’s Friendship Quilt, Lynda Salter Chenoweth reveals the value of signature quilts as historic and social documents waiting to be read.

Bessie Potter Vonnoh

Sculptor of Women

In the Gilded Age, when most sculptors aspired to produce monu­ments, Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872–1955) made significant contributions to small bronze sculpture and garden statuary designed for the embellishment of the home.…

Rookwood and the American Indian

Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection

The nation’s premier private collection of Rookwood art pottery featuring American Indian portraiture is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 2007 to January 2008.…

Paris on the Potomac

The French Influence on the Architecture and Art of Washington, D.C.

In 1910 John Merven Carrère, a Paris-trained American architect, wrote, “Learning from Paris made Washington outstanding among American cities.” The five essays in Paris on the Potomac explore aspects of this influence on the artistic and architectural environment of Washington, D.…

The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin

In 1877 the thirty-year-old artist Mary Louise McLaughlin wrote China Painting, the first manual on the subject in the United States written by a woman for women. Extremely successful, it is now accepted as the book that launched the china painting movement in America.…

Art As Image

Prints and Promotion in Cincinnati, Ohio

Cincinnati was a major printing and publishing center from the earliest days of the Old Northwest Territory. The spectacular technological and artistic developments in the 19th-century printing trade nationally were reflected in the Cincinnati printmakers' achievements, many of which were promotional in nature.…

Rookwood and the Industry of Art

Women, Culture, and Commerce, 1880-1913

Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati--the largest, longest-lasting, and arguably most important American Art Pottery--reflected the country's cultural and commercial milieux in the production, marketing, and consumption of its own products.…

West Virginia Quilts and Quiltmakers

Echoes from the Hills

Tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, preserved for generations, handmade bed quilts are windows into the past. In 1983, three West Virginia county extension agents discussed the need to locate and document their state's historic quilts.…

Art and the Reformation in Germany

The Reformation had considerable impact upon the world of art in sixteenth-century Germany, but that impact was not everywhere a uniform one. Some early Protestant leaders reacted to what they viewed as the idolatrous misuse of visual imagery in late medieval Catholicism with a demand for total abolition of paintings and figurative sculpture from the churches.…