The New Golden Land surveys the image of America in European art.

The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time By Hugh Honour Pantheon, 300 pp., $20 Perhaps because we Americans are such a self-conscious people, we have always doted on reading what others think about us, whether their impressions are flattering or the opposite. From Tocqueville and Mrs. Trollope to Simone de Beauvoir and Jürg Feder-spiel, European authors have been able to bank on the fact that whatever they wrote about America, Americans, if not their own countrymen, would buy their books and ponder them. Which makes it rather surprising that until now, no one has bothered to investigate how European artists, as opposed to writers, have visualized America over the years, what image they created, and to what extent that image is based on reality. Now a British art historian, Hugh Honour, has done the job, and done it superbly. His beautifully illustrated book—published in connection with the Bicentennial exhibition “The European View of America,” organized jointly by Washington’s National Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and France’s Reunion des é Nation aux (Mr. Honour is also responsible for the scholarly catalogue accompanying the exhibition)—is a fascinating piece of research that should be read by everyone concerned with the American image, present as well as past.

Among the many Europeans who have drawn or painted America, only a handful were first-rate artists. Relatively few had a first-hand acquaintance with their subject; they based their images, especially during the early centuries, on written descriptions. But this did not deter them from establishing, almost as soon as it became clear that Columbus had found not Asia but a new continent, stereotypes that have determined the way Europeans looked at us ever since. Their image is a two-sided one, the result of what Mr. Honour calls “bifocal vision.”

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time By Hugh Honour Pantheon, 300 pp., $20 Perhaps because we Americans are such a self-conscious people, we have always doted on reading what others think about us, whether their impressions are flattering or the opposite. From Tocqueville and Mrs. Trollope to Simone de Beauvoir and Jürg Feder-spiel, European authors have been able to bank on the fact that whatever they wrote about America, Americans, if not their own countrymen, would buy their books and ponder them. Which makes it rather surprising that until now, no one has bothered to investigate how European artists, as opposed to writers, have visualized America over the years, what image they created, and to what extent that image is based on reality. Now a British art historian, Hugh Honour, has done the job, and done it superbly. His beautifully illustrated book—published in connection with the Bicentennial exhibition “The European View of America,” organized jointly by Washington’s National Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and France’s Reunion des é Nation aux (Mr. Honour is also responsible for the scholarly catalogue accompanying the exhibition)—is a fascinating piece of research that should be read by everyone concerned with the American image, present as well as past.

Among the many Europeans who have drawn or painted America, only a handful were first-rate artists. Relatively few had a first-hand acquaintance with their subject; they based their images, especially during the early centuries, on written descriptions. But this did not deter them from establishing, almost as soon as it became clear that Columbus had found not Asia but a new continent, stereotypes that have determined the way Europeans looked at us ever since. Their image is a two-sided one, the result of what Mr. Honour calls “bifocal vision.”