Delaware Art Museum Hosts Young America

Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington.

The exhibition, on view through August 13, 2000, traces the country's transformation from colonies to nationhood through great portraits, landscapes, and scenes of early America.

This nineteenth-century "dead-end kid" possesses none of the charm associated with mischievous little boys.… His sly, almost calculating look, as he expertly flicks the marble, is as unnerving as his ragged appearance, which speaks to his neglect and possible abuse.

The artist David Gilmour Blythe—himself a dissolute and social misfit—painted several such street urchins whom he may have routinely noticed on the streets of Pittsburgh.… Blythe's urchins, much like those in the popular novels of Charles Dickens, disgraced the society that had failed them.

Source: Amy Pastan. Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: David Gilmour Blythe, 1815–65, Boy Playing Marbles, ca. 1858, oil, 22 x 26 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.