Josephine W. Rodgers, the Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, discusses the Gallery’s collection of 19th-century American mural paintings. Rodgers highlights a gift that Yale University received from Archer M. Huntington in 1926—which comprises paintings by Elihu Vedder, Edwin Howland Blashfield, and Harry Siddons Mowbray—to articulate how the Huntington family’s Gilded Age residence in New York sought to monumentalize the virtue of Commerce. The idealism embodied in these allegorical paintings serves as a visual assertion of the humanist values that captivated a generation of American artists from the nation’s centennial to World War I.



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