A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART
By
SADAKICHI HARTMANN
AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1828.
Cardinal Bentivoglio by Van Dyck |
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DURING the reign of King George III, when the town of Boston had
scarcely more than eighteen thousand inhabitants, there hung in the library of
Harvard University a copy of the Cardinal Bentivoglio by Van Dyck, painted by
John Smybert, the first English artist of any note who settled for a length of
time in New England.
This picture, although nothing but a pale reflection of a master-work,
served a number of young American painters as chief object of inspiration, —
Copley, Trumbull, Wilson Peale, and Allston copying it in turn, — and may, in this
respect, be regarded as the first impetus to the foundation of a native
American art.
This fact in itself is significant enough to show the conditions of art
resources at the time when young Copley in Boston and the Quaker boy West
in Philadelphia made their first venture in the world and their profession. In
our day of constant interchange it seems hard to realise the position of a constant interchange in the eighteenth century. There was absolutely no art friction in the
atmosphere; the few artists who had achieved anything like excellence, as
Malbone, the miniaturist, E. Savage, F. V. Doornick, A. Bullard, Pine, the
Englishmen Blackburn and Williams, Cosmo Alexander, the teacher of Stuart, and
Samuel King, of Newport, the teacher of Allston, could diffuse their
sentiments, opinions, and experiences only in most limited circles.
Exhibitions were unknown, and the patronage of the few families who were no
longer brought face to face with the elementary problems of existence was
confined to portraiture. The majority of pointers of this period, as well as
that of the early part of the nineteenth century, were "travelling
artists", who went forth over the country, painting portraits or
sign-boards, decorations for stage-coaches and fire-engines, or whatever else
they could find to do for practice and living. The talented artist, who felt a
soul struggling within him, was forced to let it expand with no help from his
surroundings — indeed in most instances with the very meagrest of mechanical
resources.
The New England States, although opposed to art on principle, were
after all that part of the country in which signs of literary and artistic
activity became first apparent in sporadic and individual cases.
John Singleton Copley (1737-1815) |
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John Singleton Copley (1737-1815) was the only American artist of this
period who did meritorious work before he came under foreign influences.
Already as a young man he wielded his brush with more than ordinary dexterity,
and revealed himself as a full-fledged personality. His large compositions,
"Death of the Karl of Chatham" (at the National Gallery, London) and
"The Death of Major Pierson", which established his fame in
England, are painted with a breadth and virility that remotely recall
Rembrandt and Franz Hals. The grouping of the numerous portrait figures in
the Chatham picture is most skilfully arranged, and the distribution of the
high lights on the principal scene of action, on the heads of the numerous
figures, and the brown-panelled walls, is handled with astonishing mastery. His style, simple and matter-of-fact, influenced David to that
extent that he suddenly changed his style and painted the death of Marat and
Lepelletier in a similar realistic fashion. Of course, Copley's creations
were still studio pictures; he stood no close relation with nature, and could
never overcome the hardness of his outlines, but his efforts give us at least
half-way artistic reflections of the costume and character of his time. To our
art only the portraits which he painted in Boston are of importance. They lead
us into interiors of the "royalist era", with carved chairs and
showy curtains, peopled with well-to-do men and women, proud of their birth,
and lavishly robed in ruffles, silver buckles, gold-embroidered waistcoats,
and rich brocade dressing-gowns.
| The Death of Major Pierson |
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| The Death of the Earl of Chatham |
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| The Copley Family |
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Benjamin West (1738-1820) |
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Copley's contemporary, Benjamin West (1738-1820), had nothing at all in
common with the development of American art. He left at an early age for
England, where he climbed the very pinnacle of social if not artistic success,
becoming a personal friend of the king, who almost exclusively employed him as
his historical painter from 1767 until 1802, and succeeding Sir Joshua
Reynolds in the Presidentship of the Royal Academy in 1792. He became
responsible for many portraits, and endless historical and Biblical works,
which can be studied to the best advantage at the London National Gallery and
the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. His dignified but stilted compositions,
like "Christ Rejected" and "Death on the Pale
Horse," have become absolutely unpalatable to our modern generation. We
appreciate his love for heroic size, — the canvas of his "Christ
Rejected' is 200 by 264, — his daring innovation of dressing historical
characters in the costume of the
time and country in which they lived ("The Death of Wolfe"),
but remain absolutely unmoved by his cold, relief-like drawing and dead, gray
colouring. It is rather his picturesque personality than his art which attracts
us today.
Nevertheless the intluence of his career was favourably felt. His
success had been so extraordinary that fired the ambition of many a young
American painter. What was possible to a poor Quaker seemed to be also within
easy reach of other talents. It served as an encouragement to take up painting
as a regular profession. And his native town, Philadelphia, where it was said
that the Cherokee Indians taught him the secret of preparing colour, profiled
the most by it. It was the first city of the Union where opportunities for art
growth and a moderate patronage presented themselves. Matthew Pratt and
Robert Feke, a Quaker, who enjoyed the reputation cf painting almost as well as
West, painted numerous colonial family portraits. Charles Wilson Peale (17411829),
a man of rare versatility and also a portraitist of some merit, established the
first art gallery, a "Museum" of historical portraits, in his
residence at the corner of Third and Lombard Streets, Philadelphia, and helped
to found the Philadelphia Academy in 1805, whose director he was until 1810.
| Christ healing the sick |
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| The Death of Wolfe |
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| Death of a pale horse |
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In the meantime the first two of what we may call "native talents" had exerted themselves in behalf of American painting : Gilbert Stuart
(1755-1828) and John Trumbull (1756-1843).
Gilbert Stuart
(1755-1828) |
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Gilbert Stuart, born at Narragansett, R. I., is one of the most
remarkable colourists and portrait painters of modern times, and had for
almost a century no superior on this side of the Atlantic. His stay with West
in London harmed the originality of his work in no way; from the very start
his art was as delicate and refined as that of his contemporaries Romney and
Gainsborough, with whom he successfully competed. Many of the best years of his
art life, however, were spent in America, where he painted many notables of the
day, among them George Washington, who sat for him three times. (The Vaughan
picture belongs to Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Philadelphia, the Lansdowne, a
full-length portrait, is at the Philadelphia Academy, and the Athenaeum head
at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.)
Brilliant colouring, firm yet remarkably free handling, natural,
life-like posing, and an individual conception which dominates all the details
of his workmanship, are the striving characteristics of all his pictures. The
richness of his flesh-tints, and his unerring precision in modelling the face
without the help of lines,— he always remained true to his much quoted maxim,
"There are no lines in nature"— all apparently so simple and yet so
massive and effective, are astonishing. An inexhaustible virility and
ever-buoyant enthusiasm furnished the key-note of his character, and the
result was portraits of men and women, who seem alive and imbued with an
individual character of their own, even if the colour of their complexion is
subject rather to an idealising method than to nature. His brush work as well
as his colour—with the exception of those portraits that have of late acquired
a curious purplish hue — are as interesting today as they were one hundred
years ago. He was a past master of his art, and it took almost a century of
ceaseless work and endeavour before American painters learned to paint again
with the same ease and grace as did Gilbert Stuart, when our
American art was still in its swaddling- clothes.
John Trumbull (1756-1843) |
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Trumbull was quite a different type. He was less richly endowed with
natural gifts; with him every accomplishment meant strenuous study, and the
less said of his merit as a painter the better. Yet he will always remain dear
to us for his glorification of our revolutionary history, for his "Battle
of Bunker Hill", "Death of Montgomery", and "Declaration
of Independence," reproductions of which are familiar to every child, as
no primer of history is published without them. Most of his pictures are in the
art gallery of Yale College ("General George Washington Resigning his Commission", "Surrender of Lord Cornwallis", "Surrender of General Burgoyne", "Death Of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton", "Portrait of Alexander Hamilton", "Portrait of G. Washngton","The Misses Mary and Hannah Murray").
America had now become an independent nation, and everywhere a restless
activity set in. The problems of existence had to be solved, new forms of
government founded, and manifold incongruous elements welded into one nation.
The growth of our art, however, was rather handicapped than benefited by
these conditions. The "royalists", the only ones who could afford
the luxury of art, had left the country, and the rest of the population, forced
to wrest from fate the right of existence, were too busy with their material
welfare to feel anything but indifference for those few assertions of poetic
sentiment that now and then appeared or the surface of public life. In the
first twenty years of the nineteenth century our art life was still utterly
insignificant. But again three men stepped forth who bore upon their
brush-tips the honour and progress of American art : Thomas Sully (1783- 1872),
John Vanderlyn (1776-1852), and Washington Allston (1770-1843).
Thomas Sully (1783- 1872) |
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While the second war with Great Britain was raging in the North, Sully,
having chosen Philadelphia for his permanent home, rapidly became the most
fashionable portrait painter of the day. In forming his style, he had been chiefly
influenced by Thomas Lawrence, and like him he portrayed all the fashionable
women of his time. Nearly every Philadelphia family with ancestors has to show
some of these sweet, musing faces, with their robes draped picturesquely about
them, and with nothing to do but to look graceful. At the historical portrait
exhibition at the Philadelphia Academy, 1887-88, Sully was represented by one
hundred and six pictures, showing great versatility and extraordinary powers of
conception and execution. He himself would, no doubt, have been the first to
admit that he had done too much, but in that he is not exceptional. Few artists
have the heart to refuse commissions, when such are almost thrust upon them, —
as was the case with Sully since he had painted a full-length portrait of Queen
Victoria in 1838, — and try for less work, more thoroughly executed ("Mother and son","Passage Of The Delaware","Lady with Harp. Portrait of Eliza Ridgely","Portrait of the Misses Mary and Emily McEuen", "Portrait of Elizabeth McEuen Smit", "Portrait of Andrew Jackson, USA President","Portrait of Fanny Kemble","Cindrella at the kitchen fire", "Boy in a Straw Hat", "Elizabeth Bordley (Mrs. James Gibson)", "The Gosip", "The Skater").
| John Vanderlyn (1776-1852) |
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About the same time that Sully depicted Pennsylvania ladies of fashion,
Vanderlyn, living in Rome in the house that Salvator Rosa once occupied,
painted his "Ariadne," and Allston was at work in Cambridgeport at
his enormous canvas, "Belshazzar's Feast."
In the work of both these men, the influence of Italy is palpable. Many
pictures of the old masters, either originals or copies of more or less merit,
had been reported from the Italian peninsula during the disturbances which
then convulsed Europe, and strongly influenced public taste in their favour.
The artists, waiting patiently, but in vain, for the public to come up to
their ideals, decided to meet a half-way by studying the Italian methods of
painting. And so it became the fashion for young art students to go to
Italy—Henry Bainbridge, a pupil of Mengs and Battoni, was the first — to
complete their art studies, as later on they went to Dusseldorf and Barbizon.
But there was little for a painter to learn in Europe at that time, no
matter where he went. The art of painting had fallen asleep with the decadence
of the Dutch school, and was once more in a lethargic state. It was the time
of Davids and Overbecks and Wests, a time devoid of great painters. All the
teachings of academies and universities tended to monumental art; drawing and
composition were mastered solely as the language of ideas, and the human figure
was studied chiefly for the expression of narrative or dramatic action.
Conceptions so lofty could hardly find an adequate sphere in easel painting,
but needed canvas of a larger scale.
| Washington Allston (1770-1843) |
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Washington Allston represents this school in America. Thanks to Jared B.
Flagg, his biographer, we know more about this painter's life and public career
than that of most artists. This biography is a very reliable and elaborate
work, going into the minutest details. But there is hardly a demand for such a
memorial of the painter of "Belshazzar's Feast."' Only a certain set
of old-fashioned amateurs, who cannot keep pace with the rapid strides of
modern art, and who still cling to Allston's memory as to a sort of American
Titian, may have looked out for such a book, and now greet it with all the mild
enthusiasm left to old age. The younger generation, however, aspiring to
understand modern art, which sacrifices ideas and feelings to technical
accomplishment, has but little in common with the austere dilettantism of
Washington Allston. ("Moonlight landscape", "Storm rising", "Elijah in the Desert", "Hermia and Elena".
Washington Allston could be treated in a friendly manner without
receiving the cult of a demigod and absurd comparison with the cinquecento
masters. As a man of artistic temperament and ambition, he stood high above
even the more advanced of his period, and Longfellow's, Lowell's, and
Emerson's admiration for him can probably be explained by the sympathy they
felt for that quiet enthusiast, whose dreary fate it was to paint "under
debt" in Cambridgeport. What a Hades Cambridgeport must have been
seventy-five years ago to a man of Aliston's character!
And we, standing in the full glare of sunlight, when we look back to
the past, and perceive his dignified figure against the dark, sombre background
of his unfinished "Belshazzar's Feast", at the Boston Museum, with
its heavy architectonic background and life-size figures, — even the most
radical impressrionist among us, —should feel something like reverence for that
man, who ever shunned popularity and held nothing dearer than his art. Many of
our mercenary painters might go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and learn
something of that sublime botcher, who was sincere even when he made such daubs
as "Lorenzo and Jessica."
His nobility of character can best be traced in his outline drawings;
they are firm, graceful, and competent, but he invariably failed to convey the
idea they expressed into his firished pictures, which have but little merit in
regard to colouring, values, or modelling. He was an imitator all his life
and very often a copyist, as in "The Sisters," where a whole figure
is borrowed from Titian's "Lavinia".
| Sisters |
Lavinia |
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He liked the architectonic background of Titian, the Michael Angelo
attitudes of Tintoretto, the purity of design of
Raphael, and now ard then demonstrated in his paintings the result of
these studies. Of all his paintings, that are at present in America, his
"Angel Liberating St. Peter from Prison", in the Lisane asylum at
Worcester, is the only one that has decided merit. The slender figure of the
angel, robed in white, his sweet Raphaelic face, framed in by waves of brown
hair, is beautiful, and almost worth a trip to Worcester. His portraits, like
those of his mother, and of Coleridge, represent, perhaps, his best work,
though they can in no way stand comparison with the portraits of Gilbert
Stuart.
A direct outcome of the Italian school was Vanderlyn, who has painted
only two pictures of decided merit, "Marius Sitting on the Ruins of
Carthage" (in the possession of Bishop Kip, California), medalled
personally by Napoleon I in 1808, and his "Ariadne of Naxos" at
the Philadelphia Academy. Few painters have ever succeeded in rendering the
nude with such purity of expression as in this figure "pillowed upon her
arm and raven hair". It is in my opinion the best nude this country has
ever produced, and I say this after due consideration of a "Nude" by
Fuller and "The Reflection" by Fitz. Many of our modern painters
may be technically Vanderlyn's superiors, but the " innocent repose "
and "unconscious loveliness" of this Ariadne seem impossible for them
to attain. At that time realism was still unknown, and the figure is in
consequence an ideal one, but so beautifully modelled and so delicious in its
flesh-tints that one willingly misses the modern note. Vanderlyn's technique
was in every way sufficient to realise the conception. Only the landscape is of
inferior workmanship, but its dark green monotonies form a delightful background and contrast with the red and the while of the drapery, and the rose
tints of the body.
| Vanderlyn's Ariadna of Naxos |
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The excellence of the work of some of the men mentioned in this chapter
was largely due to foreign influences, and did not combine toward a practical
and common end. Each one had to work out his own salvation. Besides they
attempted too much. Great epics cannot be accomplished by amateurs. Their
gigantic canvases might not have been filled successfully even by a Veronese
or Tintoretto. Consequently their talents were not always shown to their best
advantage in these ambitious tasks. The less important their work happened to
be, the more artistic it seemed to become. Some of the academical studies after
the nude by Trumbull are charming, and some of Allston's sketches contain
delightful passages.
The joint endeavour to pass to styles more naturalistic and poetical,
to endow American art with traits distinctly native, was made during the
following fifty years. It was a hard struggle, many mistakes were made, and
although the artists wished to rely entirely upon their own technical
resources, they never succeeded in freeing themselves from the imitation of
foreign conventionalities. Only after years of dilettantism were they wise
enough to study more advanced foreign styles and develop those complete methods
which sustain our present art.
The more astonishing do the few but brilliant efforts of those men who
nourished the growth of American art at its beginning appear to us now. The
art of few nations can boast of having possessed at the very start one of
the most remarkable portraitists of all times and countries, and to have
produced, in regard to proportion and symmetry of form and composition,
gravity and dignity in motive and conception, one of the best nudes ever
painted.
CHAPTER II.
OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS.
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