Rooms of memory: The artful interior in American painting, 1880 to 1920 (Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Edmund Charles Tarbell)

From 1880 to 1920, many American artists depicted what I call the artful interior with a single female figure. Placed in the midst of a collection of art and artifacts from various cultures and periods, a fashionably dressed, "modern" woman interacts with her surroundings. This dissertation proposes that this imagery usually celebrated for its beautiful surfaces and its non-narrative subject matter has symbolic and associative significance. Created during a period when interior decoration was considered a form of self-expression and objects were believed to cultivate the individual, these artful interior pictures, I contend, represent the self and its means of development through the appreciation of past culture. To elucidate this argument, I first consider the art and artifacts, illustrating how the artists carefully selected and arranged a collection of objects intimately connected to their own life experience to construct a personal history. Then, I show how the woman appears as a female type in the act of cultivating herself through personalizing and by extension preserving past culture. This interpretation of the artful interior includes a detailed examination of the pictures themselves in the context of the artist's life and artistic process. To understand the personal and cultural associations of the objects, I rely on the artist's biography, period interior decorating manuals and periodicals and recent theories about collecting. My discussion of the female figure draws on turn-of-the-century and current scholarship on fashion, race, cultivation and women's domestic roles.; After an introduction and a first chapter that present the thesis, historical context and method of analysis, the three succeeding chapters focus on the artful interiors of American artistic leaders and friends, William Merritt Chase (1849--1916), Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862--1938) and Frederick Childe Hassam (1859--1935). By investigating each artist separately, I show the unique way in which he adopts the artful interior to visualize his ideal sense of self and its making before comparing the three artists' approaches in my conclusion.