American Art

I

Introduction

American Art, painting and sculpture in colonial America and then the United States, from the late 16th century to the present. Until the early 19th century, painting in America was confined largely to portraiture, sculpture to utilitarian objects. But in that century American artists took up the full range of subjects in painting—still lifes, landscapes, history paintings, and scenes of everyday life. Sculptors began to produce large-scale works in marble. In painting landscape emerged as the dominant subject. The earliest landscape painters in America, the Hudson River School, conceived of the land as wild and intractable, reinforcing America's view of itself as something new, a kind of Garden of Eden. At first most artists in America lived along the Eastern seaboard, but starting in the 1830s and 1840s some artists from the East pushed westward, a move reflected in paintings of Native Americans by George Catlin and paintings of animals and Native Americans of the Rocky Mountain region by Albert Bierstadt. These painters helped Americans envision the vast land to the west.

A core of realism, a reluctance to depart from the facts of existence, continued in painting until the end of the 1800s, even when painters conveyed a somewhat romanticized view of nature. We can see this adherence to realism in unidealized portraits by colonial painters such as John Singleton Copley and in mid-19th-century landscapes by the so-called luminist painters, who explored the effects of light. And when Childe Hassam and other American painters turned to European impressionism in the late 1800s, they kept the figures and objects in their paintings fairly intact, in contrast to the Europeans who dissolved objects into patches of color. Opposing this realist mainstream were a few imaginative approaches, such as the mystical landscapes by Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock. In sculpture, neoclassicism—a revival of ancient Greek and Roman styles that was popular in Europe—became deeply ingrained, persisting into the late 1800s.

Until World War II (1939-1945), Americans saw their art as provincial compared to the best that Europe had to offer. In the 1950s the United States—New York City in particular—took the lead with its own movement, abstract expressionism, and American art remained dominant into the 21st century. In the last decades of the 20th century, art in America and elsewhere embraced new materials, including industrial metals; vinyl, cloth, and other soft materials; fluorescent lights; and even the earth itself. No one could have dreamed of these developments when American art was young.

For information about the history of architecture in the United States, see American Architecture. For a discussion of photography as an art form, see History of Photography. For information about the arts of Native Americans, see Native American Art. See also Folk Art and Decorative Arts, as well as articles on individual decorative arts such as Furniture and Metalwork.

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II

Colonial America

The first works of art created in America after European arrival were probably watercolor drawings made by English artist John White from 1577 to 1590. They show the animals, plants, and Native Americans in and about English settlements in Virginia. Not until the last half of the 17th century did the American colonies produce a sizable body of paintings—all portraits. Sculpture in the round—sculpture meant to be seen from all sides—did not exist in the colonies in the 17th century. Carved gravestones were abundant, however, and their sculpted motifs of skulls or skeletons with scythes reminded of the inevitability of death.

A

Portraiture and Other Painting

The early colonial portraitists, known as limners (from the English word limn, meaning “to draw”), moved from town to town and supplemented their income through carpentry, sign painting, and other crafts. These traveling artists, who made their own paints and other supplies, had little status or honor. Their names, with very few exceptions, are unknown. Some of their portraits were crude, but masterpieces did appear, such as Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary (about 1674, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts), by an unknown artist from Massachusetts. The painting is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of maternal concern; its skillful arrangement of flat, patterned forms; and its harmony of grays, pale flesh tones, and greenish-yellows. The two chief regions of artistic activity in the colonies were eastern Massachusetts, where English models that emphasized the outline prevailed, and New York and surrounding regions, where a more realistic, Dutch-influenced tradition that sometimes included bits of landscape with the figure was evident.

As the population increased (by 1720 there were nearly half a million settlers in the colonies) and commerce spread, prosperity and the pursuit of fashion came to Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Williamsburg, Virginia; and other communities. In the decades preceding the American Revolution (1775-1783), painters such as Robert Feke from Oyster Bay, Long Island, caught the elegance of the wealthy merchants of Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; and Philadelphia. In Feke’s portraits, the men stand with their knee-length coats opened slightly to reveal their waistcoats, beneath which parts of their white shirts are tastefully displayed. Many of the men have protruding stomachs, indicating the prosperity that kept them well fed. The women show even less individuality than the men: All are in their prime, young, amply bosomed, and small of waist.

In the decade before the Revolution, it was Boston-born John Singleton Copley who focused most on the character of his portrait subjects. While still retaining something of the linear (outline) approach of the Massachusetts limners, he gave his subjects a fuller three-dimensional reality. From his portraits we have come to recognize the faces of American political leaders who advocated separation from Britain, including Sam Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. Because Copley himself opposed the separation, or at least did not strongly support independence, he settled in England. There he painted pieces dealing with English history, such as The Death of Major Peirson (1783, Tate Gallery, London). The work is an emotionalized re-creation of the death of the English commander who had fought against a French invasion of the English island of Jersey on January 5 and 6, 1781. While living in Boston, Copley valued history painting above portraiture. However, he found no market for such painting, because the colonists felt they had not undertaken any noteworthy exploits of their own, beyond fighting the battles on their soil started by the European powers.

American-born painter Benjamin West, who came from Delaware County near Philadelphia, spent most of his career in England as official painter to King George III. In England West’s scenes of historic events on American soil were viewed as part of British history, such as Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-1772, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Today, both the English and the Americans claim West as one of their own.

B

Sculpture

During the 1700s the colonists began creating sculpture apart from gravestones. Among the items that appeared were copper weather vanes, carved wooden figureheads for the fronts of ships, and wooden figures placed outside shop doors to identify the trade found inside. Woodcarvers generally based ship figureheads on mythical figures such as mermaids. The workshop of Simeon Skillin and his three sons in Boston turned out some of the best of these. Wooden shop figures included cigar store Indians to identify a tobacconist (Native Americans had introduced Europeans to tobacco) and sailors to identify a ships’ supplier. Woodcarvers continued to make these figures throughout the 19th century.

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