NEW YORK.- The New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), New York City’s first museum, presents Group Dynamics: Family Portraits and Scenes of Everyday Life at the New-York Historical Society, an unprecedented exploration of group portraiture drawn from the Society’s extensive collection of paintings, photographs and sculpture. The exhibition features 90 works of art ranging from masterpieces of colonial, federal, and Victorian- era painting to painted portrait miniatures and souvenir tintypes. Group Dynamics is on view through September 17, 2006 at the New-York Historical Society, located at Central Park West and 77th Street.

“Although the Society’s portraits of significant figures in American history are well known to scholars of art and history, the collection also includes a remarkable array of family and other group portraits that have been little studied and rarely exhibited,” said Dr. Linda S. Ferber, N-YHS Museum Director. “Their rich and complex imagery offer a comprehensive visual survey of American art, society and culture, and allow us to closely track changes in style and taste.”

Bringing these extraordinary works of art together for the first time offers an insightful look at the ways in which the individuals portrayed interact with each other within the frame, and with the viewer, both in their own day and today. They also reveal much about ways in which new Americans—a diverse group of people lacking a common heritage—forged a unique new national identity. Organized around six themes, “Image and Narrative,” “The Social Landscape,” “Society, Gender, and Class,” “Family Ties: Defining the Self,” “Fictions of the Pose,” and “Life Out-of-Doors,” Group Dynamics employs the Society’s abundant holdings of fine arts to identify and explore ways in which American paintings, sculpture, and photographs reveal a commonality of attitudes over time and across class and economic lines about social position, family, and gender.

Group Dynamics surveys over 100 years of American portraiture, from the early colonial era, when wealthy citizens had themselves portrayed in the manner of aristocratic English and European traditions, to the end of the 19th century, when advances in photographic processes and reduced costs made portraiture readily available to all. The exhibition includes painted portraits ranging from monumental canvasses to miniatures, genre paintings or scenes of ordinary life, daguerreotypes and other photographs, and small-scale sculptures known as Rogers Groups that decorated the parlors of middle-class homes after the Civil War. From painted portraits of members of New York’s mercantile elite to photographs of immigrant families, Group Dynamics provides an intimate view of sentimental and domestic relationships in America.

A centerpiece of the exhibition is The Peale Family, Charles Willson Peale’s (1741-1827) ambitious portrait of his extended family. A masterpiece of late colonial American painting, the work depicts members of the family, many of whom were also artists, gathered around a table for a drawing lesson. Peale fondly observes his grown and infant children from the background, while his first wife, who had died before the painting was completed, occupies the center of the canvas.

Familial and social relationships are presented in Augustin Edouart’s (1789-1861) cut paper silhouette, Dr. John Cheesman and Family with Guests (1840). In an extraordinary demonstration of Edouart’s mastery of the technique, the dynamic scene presents seventeen full-length figures, dressed for a party, in a luxurious domestic interior. Some hold musical instruments, others appear engrossed in animated conversation. Francis B. Carpenter’s (1830-1900) The Lincoln Family (c. 1865) explores family life on a more personal scale. Having spent months at the White House on an earlier commission, Carpenter was often privy to the private, domestic aspects of an otherwise very public existence for President Lincoln and his family. In the painting, executed only in shades of black and white because Carpenter planned to have it serve as the model for an engraving, the artist shows the family as it existed in 1861, gathered around a table for a quiet evening of reading and conversation. Many popular prints were later based on the painting, some with family members repositioned and color added.

Group Dynamics also offers visitors the opportunity to examine genre paintings and explore ways in which their story-telling content, focused on anonymous figures in ordinary settings, engaged in social, familial or occupational activities, reflects the narrative content of portraits in the exhibition. For instance, Eastman Johnson’s (1824-1906) seminal painting Negro Life in the South (1859) invites the spectator to ask questions and draw conclusions about the relationships of clusters of individuals depicted in an outdoor setting. John Rogers brought the medium of genre to the growing middle class with his small-scale sculptural groupings of ordinary people engaged in everyday activities. His narrative plaster “Rogers Groups” made sculpture both affordable and appealing to many.

Group Dynamics examines the ways in which the conventions of group portraiture were adopted, and ultimately transformed by the democratizing medium of photography. Not only the wealthiest Americans, but upper middle class city dwellers could pose for the daguerreotype artist in their best clothes, and with the widespread adoption of the inexpensive tintype and later paper-based photography, photographer’s studios opened across the country, bringing formal portraiture to residents of flourishing Midwestern communities and western mining towns. Photographs on display range in scale from intimate daguerreotypes and carte-de-visite calling cards to technologically challenging, imperial-sized portraits of extended families.

Also on view will be elements of a 19th century daguerreotype studio, including a camera and furniture and other equipment that made it possible to hold the desired pose for the long exposure times required. These artifacts will add to visitors’ understanding of the experience of sitting for a portrait.

The exhibition closes with an interactive feature that allows visitors to place themselves among the painted and photographic portraits they have viewed through the use of strategically positioned mirrors.

Group Dynamics is guest curated by Richard Brilliant, Professor Emeritus of Art History & Archaeology and the Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. “Portrait painting in mid-nineteenth-century America, and its popular associated medium, photography, became an effective means of asserting the significant reality of the existence of Americans as they assumed positions worthy of respect and commemoration,” said Brilliant. “Unlike the monuments dedicated to the great figures of the Revolution, of the Civil War, and of politics, the majority of American portraits represented ordinary individuals in the exercise of their private lives.”

A 150-page, illustrated catalog will accompany Group Dynamics: Family Portraits and Scenes of Everyday Life at the New-York Historical Society. Co-published by the New-York Historical Society and The New Press, the catalog will feature an interpretive essay by exhibition curator Richard Brilliant; an essay by N-YHS Associate Curator Amy Weinstein on the Society’s stellar collection of portraits and how it was formed; and entries for each work in the exhibition.