The Newark Museum organized the impressive exhibition Angels & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th Century American Art. It includes nearly 80 masterworks featuring young girls in post-Civil War America. The paintings by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, and the leading women artists of the time Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt are, as a collection, meant to “reveal a new, provocative psychological element not found in early Victorian portraiture.”
Angels & Tomboys will next be on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (June 29-Sept 30, 2013). Meanwhile, the Newark Museum is hosting its tenth annual American Girl Weekend. The two-day event which includes a fashion show and ice cream social is to raise funds for the Newark Museum’s children’s programs and exhibitions. It is sponsored by the doll company American Girl, whose dolls emphasize the history of women in America and introduce topics like child labor, poverty, and war. American Girl, a subsidiary of Mattel, sells more than $500 million worth of branded merchandise a year.