This is an accomplished and fascinating book, moving – with ease and some grace – between the fields of art, sculpture and other forms of visual culture, stage performance, literature, architecture, journalism and humour studies. Greenhill is interested in the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1893 Chicago exhibition, a “period of national reinvention” (3) in America. It was then, she argues, that a particular mode of artistic expression emerged as “calls for a new cultural seriousness ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor” (2), and as the one came to operate in intense competition with the other. As this occurred, “the pressure to make serious art became entangled in and informed by jocularity” (4) in a distinctive and highly significant manner. This argument might seem, at first glance, to smack of the sweeping generalization, but Greenhill's convincing power lies in her fine analytic detail. Focussing on New York – both “a center for humor” and “the place where the serious artist tested his mettle” (3) – she offers a series of penetrating case studies to illustrate just how the artists of the time produced “ambitious art by engaging in a sophisticated [and often highly self-aware] dialogue with popular humorous tropes and techniques” (5).

Playing It Straight takes us in a roughly chronological manner from Winslow Homer (with particular attention to his 1883 painting Playing Old Soldier) to the trompe l'oeil still lifes of John Haberle (focussing on his 1895 The Slate). Along the way Greenhill examines the work of John George Brown's paintings, Enoch Wood Perry's chromolithographs, Thomas Nast's caricatures, the animal paintings (and proposed subterranean sculpture gallery) of William Holbrook Beard, and the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens: an eclectic and, in many ways, unexpected – but successful – mix. But the author does much more than this, commenting as she proceeds on the changing modes of comic expression in America in the period and of conceptions of subjectivity, and setting one mode of an art against another, seeing (for instance) Saint-Gaudens's cosmopolitan sensibility and open-minded perspective in the context of Henry James's espousal of similar principles in The Europeans (1878). The range of Greenhill's other references and the scholarship evidenced in the extensive footnotes makes this a book that encourages us to reconsider not just the particular artists on whom she focusses but our wider understandings of cultural productivity in the period. Greenhill acknowledges the influence of her Yale adviser, Alex Nemerov (I take it that the book started out as a PhD thesis). Her work complements his to show just how much interdisciplinary art historians can offer to the field of American studies.

It is difficult to know quite on what to focus in this review given the depth of Greenhill's individual readings, the close and careful analysis they contain, and the intricacies of arguments that always end up both surprising the reader and convincing her or him (despite, in my case, some initial scepticism) of their validity. I mention what for me were the most unexpected elements of the book. The first of these takes us furthest, perhaps, from conventional art history. So Greenhill writes of William Holbrook Beard's animal paintings and their critical marginalization by the New York art world. She then discusses the proposed building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the west side of Central Park and Beard's plans for a subterranean passageway and sculpture gallery leading to this museum, a “giant earthworks” and “tunnel complex” (78) situated under the park itself. Using both Beard's illustrated designs for the project (1871) and a related oil study (1869–70), Greenhill argues that this work can be related to his other paintings, literalizing “low” art both in the positioning of his own gallery beneath the planned museum and in “redoubling … the museum movement … in chaotic monstrous form” (82) (his gallery was to be filled with figures of primitive man and of vast beasts). But in making these beasts into a form of “heroic statuary” (85), while still retaining some comic element in their representation (Greenhill speaks of the use of “his trademark cackling bear” (85)), Beard spans the space between the underground gallery and the museum above, using a mixture of seriousness and burlesque to “figuratively collaps[e] the high into the low” and to chart “an alternative path for his art somewhere between those poles” (82). Greenhill's study of Saint-Gaudens's sculpture The Puritan (1883–86) similarly illustrates a move between high seriousness and comedy, contrasting the inflexibility and righteousness of his Puritan with the environment locating the statue (which he and architect Stanford White had planned), and particularly with the “whimsically fluctuating water” (117) of the fountain directly across from it. But Greenhill also focusses on the statue itself to show how certain details (some comedic) cut against the impression of gravitas, repression and rigidity initially conveyed, arguing that we find here an open-minded oscillation between the celebration of art and beauty, play and pleasure, and alternative principles of “religious piety, industry, and self-improvement” (136). Greenhill frames her discussion with reference to the lives and values of Saint-Gaudens's friends and artistic colleagues and to the larger issues of cosmopolitanism and provincialism in late nineteenth-century American culture to strong effect here.

I am very aware that I give just a glimpse of the scope and variety of this exceptional book. It is a book, moreover, that is beautifully produced, the quality of the paper and of the illustrations adding to the pleasure of its reading. It is one that will quickly become essential to any scholar looking to understand the art and culture of Gilded Age America.