This fascinating and richly illustrated book explores the visual culture of religion in Gilded Age America through the careers of four important artists: Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer. The author demonstrates how, for many educated Americans of the Northeast, the dynamic interaction of religion and art expressed many of the intellectual and emotional forces of modernity, especially its emphasis on subjectivity. She writes, “Focusing on the individual more than the community, personal experience more than social ritual, and interiority more than shared moral standards, modern American art and religion invited disciplined transcendence” (2). “Disciplined transcendence” was important for social as well as religious reasons, and art's proponents believed good Christian art would ground Americans morally in a time of great change and keep spiritual concerns at the fore. These four artists artists were deeply concerned with individuality, transcendence, beauty, morality, and order.

In an excellent introductory chapter, the author provides an overview of the intertwining of art and religion during this period. She establishes the existence of an “all-pervasive Christian visual culture,” convincing her reader that the ideas expressed in the work of these artists were not just the property of the educated cultural elite. Her approach is that of a historian of visual culture, interested in the qualities of the art itself but more specifically in the manner that art, and ideas about art, reveal cultural and social values. This book will thus be of great interest to scholars of religion in general, even those who know little about the art of the period.

The following chapters take up the lives, work, and religious convictions of the four individual artists. All had some Christian background and belief, although not necessarily conventional ones. Three—Eakins, Tanner, and Thayer—were painters whose work frequently concerned religious subjects or motifs. The third, F. Holland Day, was a photographer who attempted to capture on film the reality of the Passion of Christ and the Christian message. For all of these artists, religion, particularly the sacrifice of Christ, was a powerfully compelling subject.

Thomas Eakins is known more for his rowing pictures than his realistic, life-sized painting of the dying Christ, The Crucifixion (1880), yet he offered this to the Metropolitan Museum as his “representative” work and it hung in the front hallway of his home for many years. The intensity and intimacy of this painting—Christ is depicted realistically as one beaten, near death, and hauntingly alone—emphasizes the humanity of Christ and the need for the viewer to confront the sacrifice directly. In Eakins's religious works, the author argues, one can see his belief that art can place historical truth in a “continuous present” connecting the material with the spiritual (or the immanent with the transcendent). While Eakins was skeptical of common religious practice, he was drawn to the educated piety and the art of the Roman Catholic tradition and the tradition and hierarchy that kept the church stable. Catholic aesthetics, the intimacy of the believer's relationship with the image and its access to the divine, clearly shaped Eakins's work.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of the most important African American painters of the period, a scion of the AME church, and representative of an African American aristocracy distinguished by “its ancestry, complexion, gentility, education, and class” (43). Although Tanner spent much of his working life in Paris, his paintings demonstrate a continued American-style preoccupation with Christian salvation and the complete liberation of blacks. Tanner performed a “visual exegesis” of biblical texts, believing that art would encourage proper, modern belief and religious behavior consonant with the aspirations of a rising African American elite. A central theme of his paintings is divine presence in human affairs, and many of his works, such as his Annunciation or Two Disciples at the Tomb, depict ordinary humans startled and stirred by revelation. The didacticism of Tanner's paintings, accomplished through measured feeling, led to neither cool intellectualism or frenzied expression, but rather fostered a quiet, internal piety.

The most intriguing character in this book is F. Holland Day, a visionary photographer with “an extraordinary extravagant personality” (93) who, among other works, took a photograph of himself in a Guido Reni pose, head tilted back, wearing a crown of thorns. Using the iconographic traditions of religious art, Day attempted to make the relatively new medium of photography capture religious sentiment. His photographs are fascinating studies in human expression, yet as one might imagine, they contain a tension between the “truth” of photographic representation, its popular, theatrical quality, and the sacred terrain of religious art.

The cover illustration, an evocative, erotic image of an enshrouded young maiden walking toward the viewer, grasping the hands of two children, is Abbott Handerson Thayer's A Virgin (1892–1893). Schwain argues that Thayer's paintings used Protestant religious iconography to deify American women, celebrating their purity and piety and crafting an image of true femininity. He pictured women as “conduits of transcendence through their embodiment in the material world” (118). Thayer's Unitarian and Transcendentalist background was reflected in a generalized “spiritual” approach to religion and art, centered on the potential of aesthetic beauty to reveal the “Infinite Source Inscrutable” (127).

Signs of Grace is an engaging book that encourages the reader to think about what might have happened when an individual, historically situated, confronted these works of art. The author embeds this act of viewing in a story that brings to light connections between art, artist, commerce, and religion with the richness of the best cultural history. The book is densely researched and tightly and imaginatively argued, and the gorgeous color plates are a feast for the eyes.