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Hovenden’s interest in depicting the home life of ordinary people culminated in the production of some of his best-known and most popular paintings in the early 1890s. Nearly half of Hovenden’s major works—his most complex in figural and compositional treatment and most important in scale—engage domestic genre themes, including a number of important paintings completed before his untimely death in 1895: Breaking Home Ties, 1890 (fig. 108); When HopeWas Darkest, 1892 (fig. 117); Bringing Home the Bride, 1893 (fig. 121); and Jerusalem the Golden, 1894 (fig. 127). Of these, Breaking HomeTies won fame and extraordinary public acclaim for Hovenden, particularly during its exhibition at theWorld’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.Yet despite his success with critics and the public in the 1890s, Hovenden found himself at the center of debates that polarized artistic taste at the close of the century.As Impressionism gained acceptance in American art circles, the artist was faced with the challenge of maintaining his emphasis on narrative, figural works painted in an academic style or accommodating the demand for a new, more modern aesthetic. Before the mid-nineteenth century, a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts defined domestic life as “that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows are centered.”1 The veneration of domesticity in Victorian England and the United States encouraged artists to portray variations on the home theme and attracted an expanding middleclass audience, who welcomed and identified with the nostalgia of such pictures. In post–Civil War America’s transition to modernity, domestic scenes offered balm for anguished memories of war and the disillusionment of Reconstruction and suggested solace for an anxious present. Home was a haven as unstoppable forces of industrialization shifted the economy from farm to factory and from the handcrafted to the machine-made, fragmented close-knit home and community life, and fanned a growing materialism and secularism.With the rupture of traditional patterns of working and living, the nuclear family and home seemed the only stolid refuge; in the words of the influential English critic and essayist John Ruskin,“the place of Peace: the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.”2 Hovenden reinterpreted the American tradition of domestic genre painting popular in the Chapter  Home Life Center of “Our Joys or Sorrows” The blessings and sorrows of motherhood and fatherhood,the joys and griefs of childhood. —S.R.Koehler,American Art (NewYork:Cassell & Company,), first half of the nineteenth century, exemplified by John Lewis Krimmel’s CountryWedding:Bishop White Officiating (fig. 105) and FrancisWilliam Edmonds’s The Image Peddler (fig. 106). Eastman Johnson had continued the tradition in the 1860s and 1870s with paintings such as The Earring (1873, Corcoran Gallery of Art) and The New Bonnet (fig. 107), but by the 1880s Johnson had turned his attention to portraiture. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Hovenden concentrated on domestic genre painting, endowing his pictures with artistic professionalism and contemporary meaning. Compared with Edward Lamson Henry, a contemporary of Hovenden’s who painted historical and modern domestic genre scenes, carefully recording details of customs, costume, furnishings, and architecture , Hovenden’s works are more pensive, omitting elaborate details and going beyond anecdote to plumb deeper emotions and themes. Hovenden referred to dislocating changes in modern life with melancholic undertones and  CHAPTER  105. John Lewis Krimmel, CountryWedding:BishopWhite Officiating, 1814. Oil on canvas, 163 ⁄16 ⳯ 221 ⁄8 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Paul Beck, Jr., 1842.2.1. HOME LIFE  warned of loss of meaning in contemporary society , while the moral core of his work continued to offer messages of hope.3 Hovenden’s plain, interior home scenes of intimate family groups often center on a familiar turning point in life’s cycle, some rite of passage, or a significant arrival or departure.Avoiding ceremony and humorous incident, he depicted some telling and pregnant moment common to the lives of manyAmericans in the late nineteenth century and welling out of his own experience of parting and change, of leaving the old and facing the new. Hovenden chose easily understood yet serious subjects that would convey shared concerns of his day, enshrine the enduring ties of family, and preserve time-honored values.These associations were comforting to his late nineteenth-century audience and had personal resonance for Hovenden, 106. FrancisWilliam Edmonds, The Image Peddler,1844. Oil on canvas, 331 ⁄4...

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