The American Renaissance was an optimistic movement that envisioned America as the successor to the great European civilizations. During the historical period now known as "Gilded Age America," the United States came into its own as a world power. Both civic leaders and the newly minted millionaires of the Industrial Revolution sought to adorn its great cities with art and architecture that would reflect the country's new status as a leader of nations. Looking back to Renaissance Italy and Classical Greece and Rome for inspiration, the painters, sculptors, decorators and architects of the American Renaissance worked cooperatively to create homes, buildings and civic monuments that would inspire its citizens and stand the test of time.

     Art historians generally cite Philadelphia's Great Centennial Exposition as the beginning of the American Renaissance. The World's Fair in Philadelphia came amidst the nation's gradual recovery from the bloody and divisive Civil War and at the beginning of a period of rapid demographic and technological change made possible by the forces of industrialization. While the American art exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial was primarily that of the homegrown Hudson River School movement, times were changing as the first native-born painters to have matriculated in Paris after the war were just beginning to come home and make their presence felt on the domestic scene.

     As American painters, sculptors and architects enrolled in the art academies and ateliers of Paris and Munich to study, they were exposed to the cosmopolitan world of European art. During the school year they studied the academic curriculum and then in the summer they traveled to popular artist's colonies and painted out of doors, or "en plein-air" in the artistic vernacular of the day. The American artists moved easily between the European cities and made artistic pilgrimages to the great art centers of Florence, Venice and Rome. As a result of their travels and studies abroad, the American artists and architects had a similar academic background, shared life experiences and, most importantly, a common aesthetic that came from an appreciation of classical models.

    When the American artists and architects were ready to graduate from their studies to meaningful work, they arrived home and found a nation that had expanded westward, sea-to-sea. By 1893, as the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner spoke about the closing of the frontier and its impact on a young nation, much of a vast continent had been domesticated. As agriculture became more mechanized and structured, the fuse on a great internal migration was lit, changing America forever from a rural country to an urban - and suburban - nation. Even though the United States was mired in economic recession for much of the Gilded Age, the rich industrialists and the cities still had the resources to commission monumental works of art and architecture, and thus the American Renaissance was born. 

Library of Congress
Jefferson Building

     Using the term "American Renaissance" for this short artistic epoch is not the construct of an art historian but the goal of the artists, artisans and the rich industrial barons and political leaders who commissioned their work. The creative spirits saw their collaboration as ushering in a new golden age where city planners, architects, painters, sculptors, interior and furniture designers and landscape architects worked together in unity as their forbearers had in Renaissance Rome. The industrialists saw themselves as living embodiments of Lorenzo de Medici - great merchant princes with both the means and the sophistication to commission art that would reflect their age. The pioneering art historian Bernard Berenson also saw parallels between the time he lived and the epoch he wrote about. "We ourselves, because of our faith in science and the power of work, are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance, and more than anticipated. The spirit seems like a small rich model after which ours is being fashioned."

     While it was a growing American self-confidence and national pride that motivated the figures of the American Renaissance, the inspiration came from great civilizations of the past. In the words of the influential Senator James McMillian, who was charged with helping plan a scheme for Washington D.C., "It is the general opinion that for monumental work, Greece and Rome furnish the styles of architecture best adapted to serve the manifold of wants of today, not only as to beauty and dignity, but as to utility."

     Even though the american Renaissance movement was nationalistic - representing what British Prime Minister William Gladstone saw in the young nation, "an immediate successor in the march of civilization" - it looked to the classical past for inspiration. Hence, the American artists, designers, sculptors and architects of the American Renaissance borrowed freely from ancient Greece, Rome and Renaissance Italy, filtering the ideals of the past through their optimistic American conciousness.

     Although the skills of the art and artisans of the American Renaissance were often used to design and furnish the 5th Avenue residences of the great New York industrialists like J.P. Morgan (1837-1913), it is the large civic projects - the Chicago World's Fair, Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, Boston Public Library, the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and the Library of Congress for which the era will be best remembered.