The art and culture of Spain significantly influenced many of America's most renowned 19th- and 20th-century artists. Mary Cassatt visited the country early in her career and first garnered the attention of the French Impressionists with her paintings of Spanish themes. William Merritt Chase, fascinated with Spanish art, traveled to Madrid and its environs to paint landscapes and study at the Prado. And Robert Henri not only drew on the country's culture and traditions as a personal muse but repeatedly brought his art students to Spain as part of their training. Featuring works by all of these artists, as well as others such as John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, this handsome volume reveals the important and varied ways that Spain inspired a century of American artists. Distributed for the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (February 12-May 16, 2021) Milwaukee Art Museum (June 11-October 3, 2021)

“The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” delves beneath the traditional “English-only” narrative of U.S. history, using Spain’s participation in a series of international exhibitions to illuminate more fully the close and contested relationship between these two countries. Written histories invariably record the Spanish financing of Columbus’s historic voyage of 1492, but few consider Spain’s continuing influence on the development of U.S. national identity. In this book, M. Elizabeth Boone investigates the reasons for this problematic memory gap by chronicling a series of Spanish displays at international fairs. Studying the exhibition of paintings, the construction of ephemeral architectural space, and other manifestations of visual culture, Boone examines how Spain sought to position itself as a contributor to U.S. national identity, and how the United States—in comparison to other nations in North and South America—subverted and ignored Spain’s messages, making it possible to marginalize and ultimately obscure Spain’s relevance to the history of the United States. Bringing attention to the rich and understudied history of Spanish artistic production in the United States, “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” recovers the “Spanishness” of U.S. national identity and explores the means by which Americans from Santiago to San Diego used exhibitions of Spanish art and history to mold their own modern self-image.