Peter Clenott

This major contribution to the study of antebellum religious art offers a detailed case study of American postmillennialism and its many visual expressions. Treating paintings as "intersections of cultural expression," Gail E. Husch begins with a single painting to spin out an interpretation in many directions, from the specific aesthetic and social concerns of artist and patron to the wider political and cultural concerns of Americans in the mid-19th century. Arguing that "genuine apocalyptic faith" was fundamental to American Protestants, Husch shows how artists, patrons, and ordinary citizens actively engaged contemporary questions of peace and war, freedom and slavery, and the equality of human beings before God in their visual arts. Part of an emerging revaluation of the role of the religious in American art, Husch asks us to read ideas as they function in works, rather than see images merely as passive illustrations of ideas. Weaving images drawn from high and low culture, politics, and religion, she develops a complex cultural narrative of the times, thus showing the truth of one picture being worth a thousand words.