The thirty-five-year period between the restoration of the Union and the turn into the twentieth century was marked by changes that transformed the very fabric of American culture and society. Territorial annexation continued to the west, and twelve new states were added to the nation, bringing the number to forty-five. Some 3,000,000 American blacks, emancipated slaves, entered the body politic as free -- though hardly economically and socially equal -- citizens. The overall population increased one and a half times, growing from 31,000,000 to 76,000,000. Fifteen million immigrants entered the country (and another 7,000,000 were children of the foreign-born). They came mainly from Germany, Ireland, Italy, central and eastern Europe. America moved from a predominantly British and Northern European heritage to an ethnically pluralistic heritage. The newcomers settled chiefly in cities, establishing a work force for industries, begun in wartime, that carried North and South alike into the modern mechanized world, and began the steady transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy.

America's remarkable growth and prosperity was not without serious economic, social, and political problems however. Depressions, widespread unemployment, and labor strife were recurrent. Large rural and urban poor classes became a reality. There would be blighted farms and city neighborhoods. Natural resources were despoiled in the cause of industrial progress. Democratic government frequently bent to accommodate the wealth and special interests of a small percentage of the populace. It was a time of "spectacular corruption in government and big business," notes art historian Richard McLanathan, "as tycoons fought ruthless battles for financial domination." James Thomas Flexner declares bluntly: "Greed appeared to have become the country's dominant emotion." And in Oliver Larkin's critical analysis:

No man of ideals, whether critic, artist, or philosopher, could ignore the changed atmosphere around him. He saw that the word "competition" had acquired a more metallic ring. He discovered that inequalities of wealth and status which had once been looked upon as temporary -- a moment in democratic time -- were being perpetuated by every device the ruling clique could fashion. Money had once been regarded as that which gave the democrat his chance to take his place among his fellows. Now it was something to be wasted visibly by men who valued a house or landscape in terms of how much its owner had been overcharged.

Immense fortunes were made by the relatively few who controlled the stock market, banking, railroads, manufacturing, real estate, and such growth industries as petroleum, meat packing, and publishing. And these who were derisively called "robber barons" became the chief tastemakers and patrons for the arts. The well-to-do tended to acquire things, things in abundance, things that gratified their aristocratic notions: old master-works, rare antiques, opulent jewelry, ornate decorative arts, first editions, and the like. Unfortunately for American artists, such "quality" was more often sought overseas. Flexner explains: "Their wealth made them seem in their own eyes to resemble less their own compatriots than the nobility, past and present, of Europe. What they wanted, they bought; they would buy European nobility." Little wonder that wry-humored Mark Twain would dub the period the "Gilded Age" -- an epithet that stuck.

Portraits tended to be larger and more imposing than before, and patrons favored landscape that was similarly grandiose and theatric. Revivalisms continued in architecture with the emergence of modes aptly adapted to palatial living: neo-baroque, Renaissance, Venetian Gothic, Second Empire, and French chateau. *

As American millionaires vied with one another to collect European materials, most artists at home endured a long depression. To some, an obvious solution presented itself: If the cultural climate was more cosmopolitan, more fulfilling, and more lucrative in Europe -- then why not reside in Europe? Many American artists went abroad for extended periods. Several -- Mary Cassatt (link), James McNeill Whistler(link), and John Singer Sargent, among the best known -- became expatriates. (How ironic that a substantially American clientele would flock to London to sit for a portrait in Sargent's fashionable studio.)

Even to those not inclined to live abroad, schooling with a European master or at one of the prominent European academies came to be held as near-essential for a young American artist's development and probable success. Both before and after the Civil War, such American painters as Albert Bierstadt (link), George Caleb Bingham (link), Richard Caton Woodville, and Eastman Johnson were learning the particular creative thrust of the Dsseldorf Academy: theatrics, sentimentality, poetic intensification of reality, and above all, insistence on precise detail. In the 1870s Munich eclipsed Dsseldorf as the leading art center in Germany. The persuasive young artist and teacher Wilhelm Leibl, who had devotedly, studied masterworks at the Pinakothek, brilliantly revived the dramatic, painterly manner of Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Diego Valasquez, and Peter Paul Rubens. Such notable American painters as Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase learned from him the "Munich style," characterized by bravura brush technique, flashing highlights, diminishing into warm, dark backgrounds, and unidealized subject matter, typically scenes from everyday life. Of import for later American art, Duveneck and Chase passed on the Munich principles to Robert Henri and other members of the Ashcan group.

As Munich supplanted Dsseldorf, so in the last two decades of the century did Paris supersede Munich as the center of greatest impact on American visual arts. "By far, the largest contingent of American students went to Paris," E. P. Richardson writes. "From the seventies on, every French painter who gained prominence, every French movement which appeared collected a number of American pupils and followers." Most of those Americans, eager to adopt the European fashions that were selling back home, studied with the officially recognized Salon painters and sculptors such as Jean-Leon Grme, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and C-E-A Carolus-Duran, or at the conservative Colarossi and Julian academies. Flexner describes the regimen:

In France, the Americans were caught up in a long drawn-out pedagogical system, much of which dated back to the 17th century. They had to draw from plaster casts and then from the nude model until they could reproduce every part of a human body in any conceivable position. The use of oil paint was a separate step, as was the composing of several figures, nude or clothed, into a logical picture.

Thus properly steeped in academic painting, or in eclectic combinations, or the refined Barbizon landscape style, or -- in sculpture -- a heroic or romantic realism, American students saw themselves returning to their native country as enlightened apostles of the grand European manner, ready to provide for the tastes of affluent patrons. But, as Flexner continues, it was a dubious homecoming for most:

These students hoped, of course, that after their return to the United States they would sell their works to the plutocrats who had been importing pictures. However, shrewd businessmen preferred to acquire the real thing from Europe rather than imitations being created in their own cities by their own compatriots.

Not all Americans who studied abroad practiced what has sometimes been called "bastard" style academic art. Some had begun to do so, but in the course of their pedantic training at the "proper" academies, they became aware of revolutionary developments outside the officially approved Salon production -- specifically impressionism and post-impressionism. One of the first, Mary Cassatt (link), befriended Edgar Degas and other French impressionists, and lived her mature creative life in France. A relatively small number of others -- including Childe Hassam(link), John Henry Twatchman(link), and Theodore Robinson(link) -- brought a distinctly American, less doctrinaire version of the style to America, albeit twenty years behind the zenith of the movement in Europe. American artists would not concertedly come to grips with modernism for yet another twenty years, in the second decade of the twentieth century.

* In fairness, it should be noted that by the latter fifteen years of the century, the nation's technological progress made possible the beginnings of more contemporary architectural invention, evidenced by the work of H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, the firms of Burnham and Root, and Hollabird and Roche -- all pioneers of the so-called "Chicago School."