"Issued in conjunction with the exhibition Traditions of America with moving pictures: American art and early film, 1880-1910, Williams College Museum of Art, July 16, 2005-December 11, 2005"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction – Nancy Mowll Mathews
A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgment Across Theater, Film, and the Visual Arts During the Late Nineteenth Century – Charles Musser
Early Film and American Artistic Traditions – Nancy Mowll Mathews
Experiencing Nature in Early Film: Dialogues with Church’s Niagara and Homer’s Seascapes – Katherine Manthorne
John Singer Sargent’s Moving Pictures – Erica Hirshler
The Line, the Stitch, and the Wardrobe: Conjuring the Past in American Mural Painting and Film at the Turn of the Twentieth Century – Lucy Oakley
The Body in Motion – Nancy Mowll Mathews
Chronophotography: Leaving Traces – Marta Braun
Frieze Frames: Painted Processions in American Art about 1900 – Marc Simpson
“A Personality So Marked”: Eugen Sandow and Visual Culture – Charles Musser
On the Canvas: Boxing, Art, and Cinema – Dan Streible
The City in Motion – Nancy Mowll Mathews
The Impressionist City in Motion: Childe Hassam and Moving Pictures in New York City, 1890–1900 – Dana Pilson
Tough Girls – Ellery Foutch
John Sloan: Movies and Moving Through the City – Joyce Schiller
Art and Film: Interactions – Nancy Mowll Mathews
The Film Crowd – Antonia Lant
Seeing, Touching, Fleeing – Michael Leja
Moving Images and the Transformation of the Image in Modern Vision – Tom Gunning
Exhibition Checklist & Lenders to the Exhibition

"This publication explores the complex relationship between American art and early film. From the photographs of Muybridge, Marey, and Eakins of the 1880s, to the first films of the 1890s which drew from established conventions of American art, to the New York films and art of the first decades of the twentieth century, the struggle between art and film both polarized and inspired the artists of its era."--Jacket