A Modest Contribution to the Arts

How can you afford to give the art- or history-lover on your list a 21-work collection of classic American paintings by the likes of Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper and Mary Cassatt?

Easy--and it’ll set you back all of $6.40. We’re talking stamps: the U.S. Postal Service sheet titled “Four Centuries of American Art.”

Now don’t laugh. Sure, they’re awfully small as reproductions go, and--no doubt for that reason--they show only portions of the original works. But these engaging miniatures also have a story to tell, about the changing preoccupations of a young country on the move.

Not that there aren’t quibbles, large and small, beginning with the title (the “four centuries” actually amount to less than 300 years) and the absence of West Coast artists.

Only one female painter (Cassatt) was included, and the sole Native American name in the series is not an artist but a tribal chief (White Cloud) in George Catlin’s sympathetic portrait. Perhaps most gallingly, the sole black artist (Joshua Johnson) is represented by a portrait of white children.

Still, this perforated art gallery (with biographical tidbits on the sticky side) has the irresistible lure of all miniatures.

The title image (it has no stamp value), Sanford R. Gifford’s “The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine” (1864-65), sets the tone of a sort of Manifest Destiny of art-making. Sitting on a mountain with his back to his box of paints and his gaze on hills turned golden by the hazy sun, Gifford--known for his treatment of light on landscape--could hardly be more removed from the carnage of the final years of the Civil War.

This story of American art begins in 1670 with John Foster’s “Portrait of Richard Mather.” An awkward image of a dour Puritan minister holding his eyeglasses and Bible, it is believed to be the first print made in this country.

Things brighten up with “Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary,” a stiff but endearing late 17th century portrait (by a painter known only as the “Freake Limner”) of a young Boston matron and her doll-like child in their Sunday best.

For some reason, paintings from the 18th century are not represented in this collection, perhaps because the typical subjects of the period (apart from portraits) were detailed history paintings unsuited to the small compass of a stamp.

The vast majority of the stamps replicate paintings from the 19th century, when American art really came into its own.

With its bold red silhouette and simple rhythms, Ammi Phillips’ “Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog”--Fido unfortunately gets lopped off here--has the irresistible charm of the best folk art. (Well into the 19th century, most American artists were self-taught journeymen who earned their bread and butter painting signs.)

In a century marked by westward migration, spiritual sentiment and the desire to establish a specifically American art, landscape was a huge theme. More than any other painter of his day, Frederic Edwin Church embodied the vision of a heroic and powerful natural world. His “Niagara” (1857) is a vast green plunging curtain of water.

The landscape of the American Northeast was the enduring theme pursued by Church and his fellow Hudson River School painters. They included Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, represented here by “Kindred Spirits,” from 1849, in which Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant chat--presumably about lofty Transcendental ideas--on a leafy promontory.

Other Hudson River painters, like Thomas Moran (“Cliffs of Green River,” 1874) and Albert Bierstadt (“The Last of the Buffalo,” 1889), ventured westward to the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite to paint natural wonders on a wilder and woollier scale.

Perhaps the most original vision of the century belonged to Winslow Homer, whose 1885 painting of a halibut fisherman in choppy seas (“The Fog Warning”) demonstrated the artist’s vigorous yet subtly atmospheric handling of air and water as well as his ability to capture the tug of war between man and nature, a hallmark of the pioneer spirit.

But if you had to choose just one painter to represent both the optimism and spunk of mid-19th century America and its hushed awe at the pristine natural world, George Caleb Bingham is your man. His “Boatman on the Missouri” is a vivid image of rakish, idle passengers (one in bare feet and a top hat) being ferried across the pale, luminous river.

In this overwhelmingly upbeat philatelic celebration of America and its art, the prickly 20th century gets a very abbreviated treatment.

Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942) was a natural, a much-loved painting of nocturnal diner patrons that evokes a sort of collective urban isolation. But why include Grant Wood’s much-parodied “American Gothic” (1930) rather than, say, a Dust Bowl photograph by Dorothea Lange?

It can’t be an accident that the Postal Service’s art history lesson stops with the sophisticated tensions of Frank Kline’s “Mahoning” and the intense color fields of Mark Rothko’s “No. 12,” both from the ‘50s. A major split between popular taste and leading forms of American art had begun, soon to become a chasm as redoubtable as the Grand Canyon.