Art in Florida

This authoritative and wide-ranging book presents for the first time the history of art in Florida from the first European artist, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who arrived in 1564, until the end of the Second World War, when art in Florida exploded into the modern forms and styles. The early chapters document the artistic offerings of early explorers and naturalists like Mark Catesby and John James Audubon, as well as the Seminole Indians and those who painted them, including George Catlin and Charles Bird King. St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement, also came to be the first center of art in Florida. After the Civil War, when Northerners began to flock to Florida for health and pleasure, art found a place in the thriving business of travel literature. This drew artists like brothers Edward and Thomas Moran, who began to paint the beauty of Florida. In the 1880s, St. Augustine, through the efforts of Henry Morrison Flagler, again became the center of artistic endeavor, attracting artists like Martin Johnson Heade. At the end of the century many prominent American artists arrived and painted the Florida they found. This included Frederic Remington, George Inness, Hermann Herzog, and Winslow Homer. In the first half of the twentieth century, Florida paintings were created by such notables as John Singer Sargent, Jane Peterson, Martha Walter, Milton Avery, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Harold Betts, Frank Weston Benson, Ralston Crawford, Andrew Wyeth, and Milton Avery. The final chapter covers government-sponsored art in the 1930s, including murals in public buildings and the Index of American Design. Collected here are 160 illustrations of Florida art, 100 in color. The illustrated paintings were gathered from public and private collections all over the country, many reproduced here for the first time.