The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910), British- American
Up for Repairs, 1875
OIL ON CANVAS, MOUNTED ON MASONITE, I5 7/8 x 11 7/8 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
Trained in his native London before immigrating to the United States in 1854, Seymour Joseph Guy rose to prominence as a painter of children's daily life in the wake of the Civil War. In Up for Repairs, the artist portrays a boy who has ripped the leg of his pants and is trying to mend the damage before being discovered. Through a carefully contrived series of gestures, spaces, and expressions, Guy shows that the boy's ruse is up.
Such levity found ready patronage in the later nineteenth century, though critics derided the artist's pandering to popular taste. As art historian Elizabeth Johns has observed, the preferred subjects of American genre painters shifted in emphasis following the Civil War, moving away from the nation's public culture and toward domestic life, of which Up for Repairs is a representative example.