This painting fuses European still-life traditions with Asian objects and aesthetics. The blue-and-white porcelain vase documents the vogue for Chinese ceramics that entranced artists of the Aesthetic Movement, such as James McNeill Whistler. The Asian-influenced aesthetics which inspired these artists are especially resonant in San Francisco, which has historically served as a dynamic site of exchange for Asian/American culture and ideas.

The young man in The Courtship sits in a relaxed posture, visiting a young woman who is immersed in her spinning. Her intense concentration makes her seem almost self-contained, giving the scene a sense of quiet intimacy. Eakins demonstrated a strong sense of the woman’s absorption in her task, an interest in carefully plotted perspective, and a concern with evoking a nostalgic view of America’s simpler, homespun past.

Influenced by Dutch old masters, Duveneck painted contemporary subjects using fluid brushwork and strong tonal values. The painterly, seemingly unfinished quality of this work contrasts with the more polished style of realism promoted in many art schools in Paris. The harem—a secluded, female-only space in a Muslim household—was a popular Orientalist subject because of its associations with exoticism, sexuality, and voyeurism.

Chalfant spent two years at the private Académie Julian in Paris, studying figure painting with the academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This studio view documents the importance placed upon nude study at the academy, which typically rewarded faithfulness to realism and discouraged artistic invention. Chalfant followed in the footsteps of several generations of American artists who studied the latest fashionable—and marketable—academic styles in Europe.

Many of Fuller’s images of African Americans and gypsies feature the same exoticism found in this poetic image of a barefoot girl of ambiguous race, wearing fanciful jewelry and gently leading a calf. The son of a farmer, Fuller farmed for much of his own life, and his representations of rural girls, like those by his European contemporaries, have been interpreted as nostalgic yearnings for a simpler way of life that was being altered by modern technology.

According to art critics, Chase’s New York studio resembled a museum. Inspired by the Aesthetic movement, Chase decorated it with an extensive collection of antiques, including the Chinese bronze, Italian Renaissance chest, Spanish religious wall hanging, Turkish coffee urn, and German clock depicted here. These objects reflected the taste for opulence and exoticism during the Gilded Age, an era of increasing international tourism and trade in antiques.

Eakins’s portraits are distinguished by their unvarnished realism, anatomical precision, and attention to detail. In this portrait of Philadelphia coal merchant Frank Jay St. John, Eakins masterfully evoked the energy and impatience of his subject, who still wears his overcoat and clutches his hat. St. John is portrayed with the tools of his trade—two grate bars (upon which coal burns to power steamship boilers), for which he had received a patent in 1894.

The luminous haze of this bright, rural scene characterizes Ryder’s work and may reflect the influence of the American Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized poetic feelings over ordinary experiences. Through painstaking technique, Ryder created enamel-like surfaces and intense colors in his works, whose rich textures and abstract qualities made him a hero to early American modernists.

William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s popular comic operetta The Mikado(1885) contributed to a taste for Japanese culture in Europe and the United States. Alexander’s image of a San Francisco production includes examples of cultural mistakes (such as the presence of an open rain parasol and platform shoes indoors), showing that the enthusiasm for Japanese culture was not always matched by a high degree of cultural accuracy.

Bierstadt’s warrior skillfully rides bareback on a rearing horse, ready to strike a struggling buffalo with his spear. His muscular body and athletic pose recall the classical conventions of ancient Greek sculpture. The scene takes place against the indistinct backdrop of an endless prairie and a flattened, cloud-filled sky. A second Native American on horseback rushes into view from the middle ground, attempting to aid the hunt with his arrow aimed at the burly beast.