Pre Civil War America celebrated its dwindling wilderness and newly discovered western frontiers through the grandiose panoramas of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. In post Civil War America – its innocence lost - artists were now eager to depict real life from direct experiences. Photographers, cartoonists and illustrators became the new artists who turned to painting to depict a change in the nation’s cultural mood. Sentimentality was abandoned with art presented not in moral terms, but through everyday scenes of modern life. Over the course of two lectures, James Hill will explore the changes in American art at the dawn of the 20th century as conventional norms were challenged by an emerging group of observational realists working in New York City. In the first he will introduce a small group of painters known as the Ashcans, who were active from around 1900, and their later influence. In the second, James will investigate the life, times and art of Edward Hopper, America’s most renowned realist whose memorable and uncanny paintings influenced the art and psyche of America for much of the last century.