Early American Painting
Blind Man's Buff, 1814
Object - John Krimmel, Blind Man's Buff
Born in the south German duchy of Württemberg, John Lewis Krimmel immigrated in 1809 to Philadelphia, where he became the first artist to take his imagery from American daily life. Blind Man’s Buff, typical of his interior genre scenes, focuses on a children’s game in which a blindfolded child tries to catch and identify other players. Compositions, character types, and subjects inspired by the works of Scottish artist David Wilkie (1785–1841), as well as seventeenth-century Dutch and contemporary German genre painting, influenced Krimmel’s domestic rural scenes. These were popularized largely through engravings. His vivid representations of mundane life struck a chord with contemporaries. Accessible and affirmative, works such as Blind Man’s Buff expressed Americans’ search for a national identity in the republic’s early years.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Blind Man's Buff, 1814
Early American Painting
Blind Man's Buff, 1814
Portrait of Mrs. John Stevens (Judith Sargent, later Mrs. John Murray), 1770–72
George Washington, Porthole Portrait, after 1824
A Peaceable Kingdom with Quakers Bearing Banners, c. 1829–1830
Girl in a Red Dress, c. 1835
Portrait of a Woman said to be Clarissa Gallond Cook, in front of a Cityscape, c. 1838
Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33
Lorenzo and Jessica, 1832
Portrait of Harriet, c. 1840
Portrait of Blanch Sully, 1839