Gilded Age

"In some ways, the late nineteenth century was a time of spectacular excess, of brass-knuckled business and shady politics, a long national carnival of fraud and bribery. These qualities appalled middle-class reformers and some later historians, who gave the times such labels as the Gilded Age, the Era of Excess, and the Great Barbecue."

"In the Gilded Age, a generation of American collectors and art historians and museum professionals came to their understanding of what interested them in Italian Renaissance art in significant part by reading Berenson's work and by listening to him talk. In Berenson's descriptions, they heard echoes of their own interests—in scientific experiment and in the progress of humanism—and of their own deep involvement in commerce."

"Wealth generated by Wall Street and industrial labor fueled a housing boom of opulent Fifth Avenue mansions, gable-roof apartment flats, and rows of shabby tenements."

"Paralleling the expansion of the American working class was the dramatic growth, both in numbers and wealth, of the middle and upper classes. For this reason, one of several terms used for the post-Reconstruction years is the Gilded Age. The term, first used by Mark Twain in a novel about economic and political corruption after the Civil War, captured both the riches and superficiality of the wealthier classes in the late nineteenth century."