Luce Center: Browse

Work is a theme that runs through the American collections. Colonial and Federal portraits rarely show the sitter engaged in actual work, although the attributes of the sitter’s profession—whether it be that of schoolmaster, mapmaker, soldier, or statesman—may be included. Landscape paintings often include images of rural labor celebrating the fertility of the land and the patriotic ideal of the yeoman farmer. Idealized or caricatured images of rural workers provided both humor and nostalgia for nineteenth-century city dwellers whose childhoods had often been spent in the country. Women’s work was the special province of Lilly Martin Spencer, whose humorous and sentimental images of domestic labor in the mid-nineteenth century brought her fame as one of the few professional female artists of her day (70.26).

Cities provided the setting for new kinds of labor. Francis Guy’s view of Brooklyn catalogues the businesses and businessmen as well as the workers of the early nineteenth-century village. George Luks portrayed immigrant street culture a century later, with urban crowds surging by storefronts and vendors (40.339). George Bellows’s grim yet dynamic image captures the antlike laborers swarming in and out of the gigantic excavation that became Pennsylvania Station (67.205.1).

The collections also include a rich array of objects used in household labor. Food molds were deemed utilitarian by their nineteenth-century users, but a curatorial selection of these objects provides an aesthetic display. In contrast, many twentieth-century century designers collaborated with manufacturers to offer the consumer functional objects that are both beautiful and useful.

	97.13	Francis Guy Winter Scene in Brooklyn, ca. 1819-1820 View object details...
	06.311	Thomas Waterman Wood New Cider, 1868 View object details...
	16.30	Julian Alden Weir Willimantic Thread Factory, 1893 View object details...
	28.422	Mahonri M. Young Right to the Jaw, ca. 1926-1927 View object details...
	30.1109	Bertram Hartman Trinity Church and Wall Street, 1929 View object details...
	39.116	Chester Beach The Stoker, 1912 View object details...
	39.608	William Sidney Mount Caught Napping (Boys Caught Napping in a Field), 1848 View object details...
	40.223	American Platter (Knights of Labor), 1869 View object details...
	40.238	American Platter (McCormack Reaper), 1831 View object details...
	40.339	George Benjamin Luks Street Scene (Hester Street), 1905 View object details...
	41.878	John Mason Furness John Vinall, ca. 1792 View object details...
	43.25	Union Porcelain Works Century Vase, 1876 View object details...
	51.8	Jasper Francis Cropsey Bareford Mountains, West Milford, New Jersey, 1850 View object details...
	51.108	Francis William Edmonds All Talk and No Work, 1855-1856 View object details...
	67.61	Jerome Thompson Apple Gathering, 1856 View object details...
	67.205.1	George Wesley Bellows Pennsylvania Station Excavation, ca. 1907-1908 View object details...
	79.169.231	W. Cory Mold, 19th century View object details...
	79.169.236	Unknown Mold, 19th century View object details...
	85.74	Edward P. Schreyer "Petipoint" Iron, Model #W410, ca. 1941 View object details...
	86.15a-f	Lurelle Guild Vacuum Cleaner, ca. 1937 View object details...
	87.31	Randy Dudley Gowanus Canal from 2nd Street, 1986 View object details...
	1992.167	Saunders Corporation "Silver Streak" Iron, ca. 1946 View object details...
	1994.109.1a-c	George Howe Inkstand and Calendar, ca. 1931 View object details...
	1998.143.1	Harold L. van Doren Sentinel Scale, 1930-1940 View object details...
	1998.143.3a-b	Egmont Arens Meat Slicer, ca. 1935 View object details...
	X908a-c	Stile Craft Manufacturers, Inc. Pencil Sharpener, "Electro-Pointer", ca. 1930 View object details...