The Way They Live

Art Historical Context

Thomas Anshutz's *The Way They Live*1879), an oil on canvas measuring 24 x 17 inches, captures a poignant slice of everyday American life in the late 19th. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing and acquired through the Morris K. Jesup Fund in 1940, this work reflects the realist tendencies of Anshutz, a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts painter influenced by his teacher Thomas Eakins Anshutz favored unidealized scenes of ordinary people, using oil's rich textures to convey depth and natural light with meticulous brushwork. The painting depicts boys, girls, and women engaged in working activities near modest houses, evoking the rhythms of rural or working-class existence during America's Gilded Age. This era saw rapid industrialization, yet Anshutz turns his gaze to the human scale of labor and community, highlighting resilience amid economic shifts. The intimate scale invites viewers to peer into these lives, much like a window into the past. As a cultural artifact, *The Way They Live* underscores the significance of genre painting in American art, celebrating the dignity of the commonplace. It reminds us how artists like Anshutz preserved the textures of vanishing traditions, offering timeless insight into who we were—and how we lived.