After All: Charles Demuth, a Modernist in Lancaster

Charles Demuth was an artist of wide reputation, represented in some of the most eminent art museums in the country. It would take some time, however, for his work to be appreciated in his own hometown of Lancaster, where the majority of his most significant paintings were created. Many of his works featured Lancaster settings and architecture. His acclaimed masterpiece, My Egypt, depicted one...
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The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: An Ideal and a Symbol

By 1805, the year the Pennsylvania Acad­emy of the Fine Arts was founded, Phila­delphia had achieved a large measure of political, social and economic stability. It had been the nation’s capital and contin­ued to thrive as a center of banking and commerce. The largest city in the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the center of culture, with Boston its...
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Executive Director’s Letter

This issue of Pennsylvania Heritage showcases star players from Pennsylvania – Christy Mathewson, whose prowess shone on the baseball diamond, and the Barrymores of Philadelphia, whose stage and screen performances delighted generations of audiences. David Lembeck’s article on New Deal murals in Pennsylvania focuses on artists and their works for post offices under the auspices of the U.S....
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Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices

On a February morning in 1937, artist George Warren Rickey (1907-2002) and a group of four men met at the post office in Selinsgrove, Snyder County. Armed with cloth-covered rolling pins, the men attached Rickey’s mural entitled Susquehanna Trail to one of the lobby’s end walls. After six hours, they transformed the entire blank white wall, from marble wainscoting to ceiling, into a...
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