National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution)
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 224
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Portraiture is a unique genre that is common ground both for American art history and history. Offering seventy-six wide-ranging examples from the National Portrait Gallery's incomparable collection, A Brush with History showscases the American portrait tradition from the country's beginnings to the present. The book contains essays by Carolyn Kinder Carr, the Gallery's deputy director and chief curator, and Ellen G. Miles, the curator of painting and sculpture. The full-page color reproductions display such works as John Singleton Copley's self-portrait, Henry Inman's Sequuoyah, Edgar Degas's Mary Cassatt, and Andy Warhol's Michael Jackson. This handsomely designed volume also includes a foreword by Marc Pachter, director of the National Portrait Gallery, and an essay by the museum's research historian, Margaret C. S. Christman, on the Gallery's history. -- from dust jacket.