The City and Country Beaux

c. 1838

Edmonds’s painting shows a theme popular in theatrical comedies of the time—a young woman between two suitors, one from the country and one from the city. The gestures and costumes are exaggerated to the point of caricature: the city gentleman in the black suit bows formally toward his boorish rival, who wears his hat indoors and disdainfully smokes a cigar. Scenes like this were usually intended to extol the virtues of American rural life, but Edmonds’s narrative is deliberately ambiguous.

Medium	oil on canvas
Dimensions	20 1/8 x 24 1/4 in. (51.1 x 61.6 cm)
Object Number	1955.915
Acquisition	Acquired by Sterling and Francine Clark before 1955
Status	On View

Image Caption

Francis William Edmonds, The City and Country Beaux, c. 1838, oil on canvas. Clark Art Institute, 1955.915

Select Bibliography

Wolff, Justin. Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger. Princeton Univeristy Press. 2002. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.. The Painter's America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910. Sept. 19-Nov. 10, 1974; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dec. 5, 1974-Jan. 19, 1985; Oakland Museum, Feb. 10-May 30, 1975.. 1974.. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum. Francis W. Edmonds: American Master in the Dutch Tradition. Jan. 9-Feb. 28, 1988; New York Historical Society, April 6-June 19, 1988. Cat. by H. Nichols B. Clark. Williams College Museum of Art.. Highlights of American Art. March 2, 1991-June 28, 1992. No cat.. 1991.. . "The Fine Arts--National Academy of Design.". vol. 16.. The Knickerbocker.. July 1840.. Charles Lanman.. Letters from a Landscape Painter.. Boston: James Monroe & Co.. 1845.. . National Academy of Design Exhibition Record: 1826-1860. Vol. 1.. New York: The New York Historical Society.. 1943.. Maybelle Mann.. "Francis William Edmonds: Mammon and Art.". vol. 2.. American Art Journal.. Fall 1970.. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. List of Paintings in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1970. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. List of Paintings in the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1972. Donald D. Keyes.. Aspects of the Development of Genre Painting in the Hudson River Area before 1852. Ph.D. diss., New York University.. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.. 1973.. Mann, Maybelle. "Humor and Philosophy in the Paintings of Francis William Edmonds." The Magazine Antiques 106, no. 5 (November 1974). Frankenstein, Alfred V. William Sidney Mount.. New York: Abrams. 1975. Maybelle Mann.. Francis William Edmonds: Mammon and Art.. New York: Garland Publishing.. 1977.. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. List of Paintings in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1984. Sarah Burns.. "Yankee Romance: The Comic Courtship Scene in Nineteenth-Century American Art.". vol. 18, no. 4.. American Art Journal.. Autumn 1986.:pp. 51-75.. Sarah Burns.. Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culpture.. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.. 1989.. E. de Jongh. Kunstschrift/Openbaar Kunstbezit.. september/oktober 1990.. 34 ste jaargang, nr 5.. Elizabeth Johns.. American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life.. New Haven: Yale University Press.. 1991.. Kern, Steven, ed. List of Paintings in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1992. Conrads, Margaret C. American Paintings and Sculpture at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990. Dearinger, David B, ed. Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826-1925. Exhibition catalogue. New York: National Academy of Design, 2000. Weinberg, H. Barbara, and Carrie Rebora Barratt, eds. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 17651915. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Brownlee, John Peter, et al. American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2012.

Provenance

W.R. Betts, Newburgh, New York, by 1844; to F.R. Betts; (Renaissance Galleries, Philadelphia); to (M. Knoedler & Co., New York, January 8, 1943); to Robert Sterling Clark, January 8, 1943.