Lure of Italy

Theodore E. Stebbins

American Artists have been inspired by Italy since the 1760s, when Benjamin West, the first American painter to travel there, was drawn to the ancient Roman ruins and magnificent Renaissance architecture, statuary, and frescoes. This intriguing, superbly illustrated book is the first to explore the fascination Italy held for the American artist from West's time to the eve of World War I. The unique sense of the past found in Italy, where tangible evidence exists of a continual civilization from antiquity to the present, lured countless American artists to its cities, towns, and countryside. Painters from West and Copley in the eighteenth century to Cole, Inness, Whistler, Sargent, and Prendergast in the nineteenth century were inspired to create many of their finest works in Italy, as were American sculptors such as Hiram Powers and Harriet Hosmer and writers from Washington Irving to...

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