The American Spirit: Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art

By the end of the 19th century, landscape paintings such as

George Inness'Morning, Catskill Valley and its flaming autumn trees inject a more overt spirituality.

Though sentimentality was a hallmark of many narrative or genre works of the time, they began also to address the reality of a growing urban underclass, a combination seen in

John George Brown's Boy Fishing and

Charles Blauvelt's portrait of an immigrant in Homeward Bound From New York.

John George Brown (British, active USA, 1831-1913), Pull for the Shore, n.d., Oil on canvas, 24 x 39 3/4 in., Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Gifts from the Estate of Mrs. Stanley McCormick, Norman Hirschl and the American Federation of Arts to the Preston Morton Collection by exchange 1971.18

In Brown's Pull for Shore, the men in a rowboat are presented in a more straightforward way, but avoiding the bleak realities that existed for poor working people...

"Cosmopolitanism in the Gilded Age" gives us the upside of all the new money at the turn of the century.

A Childe Hassam painting of The Manhattan Club and the swells walking around it, the

Interior of His Brother's House in Boston, by Walter Gay and

William Merritt Chase's The Lady in Pink (Portrait of the artist's wife), 1886 all excellent, aren't voyeuristic (they were painted at a time when those who would have seen them were social equals) or aspirational (ditto).

Combining works representing the "Closing of the Frontier" and those for the "Dawn of Mass Entertainment" into a single theme was a stretch for me in some instances, but I appreciated the unexpected juxtapositions. Frederic Remington's heroic bronze mountain man (1903) seems a long way from

Louis Eilshemius's disaffected patrons in the vaguely unsavory painting Plaza Theatre (1915), which calls to mind the Kit Kat Club in Cabaret. They're separated by just 12 years but we see the nostalgia and romance for a vanishing way of life and the strengths of individualism contrasted with a competing cynicism and sense of isolation.

The show ends with an homage to the Eight, a group of early 20th century artists who participated in a controversial exhibition in 1908...

As Henri wrote: "Paint should be as real as mud." His Derricks on the North River is a far cry from the Manhattan Club.

So is George Bellows'Steaming Streets, another dark urban landscape in which a trolley, spooked horse and onlookers combine. (Bellows wasn't in the Eight show but was an important part of Henri's circle.) Among other artists who weren't as tight with the Ashcans that were included in the Eight show was Maurice Prendergast; his Summer in the Park is a bright frolic composed of paint dashes that have no resemblance to mud.