THE SHIFTING FRONTIER
AND CINCINNATI AS AN URBAN CENTER
Growing in the course of a generation from a frontier outpost to The Queen of the West, Cincinnati rapidly became a destination that, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's words, had a society "drawn from the finest and best cultivated classes of the older states."

As the city changed, so too did the art it produced. The increasingly sophisticated tastes of patrons soon attracted artists of talent who found in Cincinnati a place that truly valued the arts.

IDENTITY
The stories of different ethnic communities, religious groups, and the significant contributions made by women to the development of the arts are woven into the narrative of The Cincinnati Wing.

PATRONAGE
Cincinnati's lively artistic culture could not have developed without the active support of enlightened people of means such as Nicholas Longworth, a patron of many early Cincinnati artists, and Reuben Springer, who was the major donor to Cincinnati's Music Hall and bequeathed his art collection to the Cincinnati Art Museum. After the Civil War, the founding of new institutions such as the Cincinnati Art Museum represented the growing support for the arts in the community and con-tributed to the development of Cincinnati's "Golden Age."

THE RISE OF INDUSTRY
In the 1860s, Horace Greely, journalist and political leader, predicted that Cincinnati would become "the focus and mart for the grandest circle of manufacturing thrift on this continent." Cincinnati's emergence as a major manufacturing center in this country sparked a vigorous debate over the relationship between art and industry and gave rise to unsurpassed innovations in ceramics and the production of superb works of art-carved furniture crafted by such masters as Benn Pitman and William and Henry Fry.

ART EDUCATION
As Cincinnati developed over the course of the nineteenth century from a small town on the American frontier to one of America's largest cities, it attracted aspiring artists in ever larger numbers. Schools such as the Ladies Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Academy provided a valuable forum for influential teachers, such as Frank Duveneck and Benn Pitman, who made Cincinnati a lively place to study the arts and enhanced its reputation as a leading center for training in the fine and applied arts.