Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America

"Fascinating, illuminating, thrilling to read. Sarah Burns critically reframes the lives and works of key nineteenth-century American artists by turning away from social history and moving, ever so deftly, toward what might be called biography of the imagination."—Paul Staiti, Mount Holyoke College

"Sarah Burns leads readers through the interior worlds of seven troubled nineteenth-century painters. With a splendid eye for historical detail, she probes relationships between the work of these tormented individuals and the national upheavals associated with slavery, immigration, industrialization, and women's rights. Painting the Dark Side explores the gothic strain in American art with luminous intelligence."—David Lubin, author of Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America

"It is Sarah Burns's mission-and gift-to ask the really interesting questions about what has often been overlooked, underestimated, or otherwise minimized in nineteenth-century American painting. In this striking new book, she looks at works we thought we knew by artists like Thomas Cole, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Thomas Eakins, discovering in their dark side the shadows that give form and depth to the standard 'sunny-side-up' version of American art history. This is the kind of original scholarship that endures."—Barbara Groseclose, author of Nineteenth-Century American Art

"Burns's Painting the Dark Side reveals the pervasive darkness at the heart of nineteenth-century American life. In each fluent chapter, she couples imaginative readings of major pictures with contemporary social concerns-racial, political, and economic-all inflected by informed psychodynamic speculation. The book associates artists rarely, if ever, considered together. The result is an original and invigorating mapping of the mad, bad, and beautiful of the American pictorial gothic."—Marc Simpson, author of Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent