NEW HAVEN, CT.- The Yale University Art Gallery presents Historical Fictions: Edward Lamson Henry's Paintings of Past and Present, on view through December 30. Widely appreciated in his own time as an artful storyteller, Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919) meticulously documented places and events, particularly those associated with early America and the Civil War. The exhibition explores the artist’s fascination with “historical fictions,” and how these romanticized visions of the past helped create a unified national identity in the discordant decades after the Civil War. Although precisely rendered, Henry’s lively paintings and drawings presented fantasies about the past that addressed viewers‚ anxieties about their changing world, which was being profoundly affected by mounting industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.

A related symposium, “Historical Fictions: Constructing the Past in Gilded-Age America,” will take place on Saturday, October 29, 2005. On Friday evening before the symposium, Michael Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, will present the keynote Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Lecture. The symposium and lecture are open to the public; registration information will be available in August.

Exhibition and publication organized by Amy Kurtz Lansing, the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Research Assistant, American Paintings and Sculpture. The exhibition is supported by the Friends of American Arts at Yale, the Eugénie Prendergast Fund for American Art given by Jan and Warren Adelson, and an endowment made possible by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The catalogue was supported by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and by the Virginia and Leonard Marx Fund.