American Art

III

From Independence to Civil War: 1783-1861

After the colonies won independence from Great Britain in 1783, the training of artists in the United States became more professional. Academies that offered art training also held exhibitions. In 1794 painter Charles Willson Peale organized the Columbianum, the first society of American artists, in Philadelphia, and the society held its first exhibition in 1795. In 1805 Peale became one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s first art school as well as the repository of its first permanent public collection. In 1817 painter John Trumbull became the first head of the New York Academy of Arts (later American Academy of the Fine Arts). Despite the presence of Peale and Trumbull, businessmen rather than artists played the main role in founding and running both institutions.

A

Painting: New Subjects, New Places

The subject matter of painting broadened considerably after independence to include history scenes, landscape, still life, and genre (scenes of ordinary people partaking in everyday life), in addition to portraiture. The new nation was in the process of forging an identity, and artists helped in the process by portraying American heroes, depicting important events, and giving visual expression to unfamiliar landscapes. Yet Europeans still provided the models that American painters sought to equal. Peale, a far-ranging scientist and inventor as well as a painter, was among the most important figures of the post-revolutionary period. In 1786 he established a museum of natural history in Philadelphia, which featured stuffed animals and birds of the United States, set up in cages containing bits of their natural habitats. The museum also displayed relics of the land’s prehistoric past in the form of mastodon bones. In his Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806, Maryland Historical Society), Peale depicted the digging up of two mastodon skeletons on an upstate New York farm. Peale also was a competent portraitist who had studied with West in London in 1767. He fathered 17 children, some of whom went on to become artists in their own right, notably Raphaelle Peale, who with his uncle James Peale became America’s first professional still-life painter.

After the American Revolution, George Washington, who had led American forces to victory, was the most celebrated man in the Western world. Gilbert Stuart, who ironically had avoided the war by fleeing to London and studying there with West, became the most noted portraitist of Washington upon his return. Having studied in London, Stuart used the then-current English approach of loosely applying paint in broad strokes, as opposed to the hard linear approach of Copley and other colonial painters. Stuart endowed Washington with a sense of noble imperturbability by glossing over small details of the face, giving his flesh a ruddy glow, and eliminating unattractive aspects such as the protuberance of his jaw misshapen by false teeth.

The United States, a sovereign nation after the Revolution, finally had its own history distinct from that of the European powers. It fell to painter John Trumbull to leave a visual record of the tumultuous events in the fight for independence. Trumbull had served as Washington’s aide-de-camp before resigning because of a perceived slight, and he traveled from New Hampshire to North Carolina to observe the topographies of battlegrounds and to visit participants. His battle scenes are filled with action and his surrender scenes have the stamp of authenticity. The observer comprehends the events as having been set in motion by shared resolve rather than by the decision of a single authoritative figure. Trumbull’s approach can be seen in his Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga (1817, U.S. Capitol Rotunda). The painting shows the red-coated Burgoyne approaching the tent of American major general Horatio Gates, with a number of American officers amassed in front of the tent. In another spirit is Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art) by German American artist Emanuel Leutze, which was painted in Düsseldorf and shipped to the United States. Like an actor in a stage melodrama, the general stands erect and resolute in his flimsy craft.

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Americans were aware that their country marked something new in the Western experience—a political entity born free, entirely removed from the dynastic struggles of the European powers. Painters represented this vision of America in different ways. In their landscapes American painters showed nature untouched by human beings, as a kind of Garden of Eden. In Kindred Spirits (1849, New York Public Library), Asher B. Durand portrays painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant, dressed in their Sunday best, on a ledge in a gorge in the Catskill Mountains as they commune reverently with the grandeur before them. Durand belonged to the Hudson River School—so-called because its members started out by painting the Catskills and other sites along the Hudson. Thomas Cole, an accomplished landscape painter who had emigrated from England to America, settled in Catskill, New York, and his fame drew others to the area. The painters of the Hudson River School held an almost religious view of nature’s majestic grandeur, in which craggy mountains and lofty trees overwhelm humankind and human concerns.

Another approach to landscape and to seascape avoided the portrayal of dramatic beauty in nature favored by Durand and others of the Hudson River School. A group of painters called luminists, whose scenes featured large areas of light-filled sky, favored instead a calm and reassuring nature. In paintings by luminist Fitz Hugh Lane, such as Gloucester Harbor (1848, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond), everything in the scene seems frozen in time.

Genre paintings were plentiful before the Civil War. William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, and other genre painters of this period typically placed figures out-of-doors, energetically engaged in some group activity. Bingham specialized in scenes of frontier life, such as Fur Traders on the Missouri (1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art). This painting depicts an old trader, his son, and a bear cub tied to their boat—all bathed in a diffuse, poetic light.

Some artists held the idea that history moved in cycles marked by the rise and fall of empires, cycles they believed—or at least hoped—would not control America’s destiny. Landscape painter Thomas Cole painted a series called The Course of Empire that deals with this imagined historical process. The work consisted of five canvases: The Savage State, The Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. In Cole’s view, America with its largely untouched wilderness presented a sharp contrast to Europe, home to many ruins. Washington Allston, who spent much of his life as a painter in Italy and England, was also interested in the idea of youthful and aging civilizations. He labored for years on Belshazzar’s Feast (1817-1843, Detroit Institute of Arts). This painting is based on a story in the biblical book of Daniel that tells of a feast given by the Babylonian king, during which a disembodied hand writes on the palace wall a message foretelling the end of his kingdom.

In the decades before the American Civil War, European settlers and their descendants continued to push westward, displacing Native Americans. The West offered artists new subjects, with its dramatic landscapes and unfamiliar inhabitants. Some painters and sculptors presented Native Americans as dangerous marauders; others, as undeveloped peoples standing in the way of civilization’s progress. George Catlin, however, whose mother had been briefly kidnapped by Native Americans when he was a child, lamented the imminent disappearance of native folkways and wished to preserve a record of them through his art. Closely studying the Native Americans of the Great Plains during the eight years he spent among them, he recorded their dances, hunting expeditions, and other activities as a kind of visual anthropologist.

Another artist to take an interest in colorful and unfamiliar aspects of America was John James Audubon, who was fascinated with birds. Born in Santo Domingo (now Haiti) and educated in France, Audubon came to the United States at the age of 18 and unsuccessfully operated general stores in Kentucky, where he began drawing American birds. In his drawings of birds, the great naturalist combined a sense of design with detailed observation of the characteristics of the various species. After living in poverty and receiving rejections from American publishers, his four-volume Birds of America, from Original Drawings, with 435 plates showing 1,065 figures of birds, was published in England from 1827 to 1838.

B

Sculpture: Classical Models

American sculptors became more ambitious in style and subject matter as they moved beyond the utilitarian pieces of the crafts tradition to what they considered a higher artistic level. In the early 1800s they began to carve large pieces in marble that carried associations with classical culture. The loftiness of the subject matter was of paramount importance. Many of these high-minded sculptors worked in Italy where they could see for themselves examples of the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome, which they used as prototypes for their own art. In Italy they could also associate with classically oriented European artists, locate quarries of the finest marble, and find teachers and assistants competent in marble carving. Like other Americans of their time, these sculptors found a fitting model for their own young republic in ancient Greece and Rome, civilizations in which all citizens shared equally in the rights conferred by the state.

The man generally considered America’s first professional sculptor, Horatio Greenough, was born in Boston but settled in Florence, Italy. He carved for the Capitol in Washington, D.C., an enormous seated George Washington (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1832-1840). (If standing, the figure would be 3.7 m (12 ft) tall.) Washington, who is shown draped in a Roman toga and wearing Roman sandals, has the pose of an ancient Greek statue of the god Zeus. Though greeted with derision in America for its portrayal of Washington half-naked and as a mythological god, the work was significant in being the first major sculptural commission given to an American. Previous commissions for large-scale statues of Washington had gone to French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon and Italian sculptor Antonio Canova.

Hiram Powers, a sculptor from Vermont, also settled in Florence. His Greek Slave (modeled 1841-1843, Smithsonian Institution) was the most admired American sculpture produced before the Civil War. The nude manacled woman has the posture of a classical Roman sculpture of Venus and represents virtue or chastity. Nudity was acceptable in art if it represented a higher ideal rather than a specific woman. In this case the figure represented a Greek woman taken captive by the Turks, thus calling attention to widespread fear of Ottoman (hence non-European) victory in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s.

IV

Civil War to the 20th Century

The Civil War (1861-1865) marked a major turning point in American painting and sculpture. The mood of optimism and assurance that had prevailed in America earlier in the century became for the most part a thing of the past. Artists no longer considered it sufficient to achieve a likeness; they began to probe into the national or individual psyche.

A

Landscape

The landscapes of the Hudson River School, such as Durand’s Kindred Spirits, carried religious connotations, a sense that the blessings and goodness of God are discernible through the contemplation of nature. Nature became far grander in the vast earthscapes of Frederic E. Church, who was a pupil of Cole’s. In Church’s painting Cotopaxi, Ecuador (1863, Reading Public Museum and Art Garden, Pennsylvania), the vista is so overwhelming that the viewer feels utterly lost within it. One senses the beginnings of Earth’s formation through awesome geological processes beyond human comprehension. Church traveled the world in search of spectacular natural phenomena: erupting volcanoes in the Andes, icebergs off the coast of Labrador, great mountains of the Bavarian Alps, and the aurora borealis near the Arctic Circle. Historians have linked Church’s canvases with Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was the inherent right of the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean. Astute spectators would have understood these scenes as resembling some of their own country’s natural wonders. And Americans were indeed pushing westward, following exploratory expeditions commissioned by the federal government.

Painters such as Albert Bierstadt helped people living in the Eastern states envision U.S. territory in the West. Bierstadt was part of an expedition sent in 1858 to explore the North Platte River, in the west-central United States, and the Wyoming Territory. In 1863 he made a second trip to the West, visiting the Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada in California. His painting Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum) shows a group of deer grazing at the edge of a lake in the foreground, with the peaks beyond so grand that Easterners could not have imagined them.

Another painter to turn the West into a colorful spectacle was Thomas Moran. Although he started out as a member of the Hudson River School, Moran traveled West and produced dozens of watercolors of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that he later used as the basis for paintings. Yet he also satisfied the desire of Easterners for paintings of landscapes familiar to them. As did many other landscape artists, Moran chose times of day with dramatic light—sunrises, sunsets, and twilight—as in Sunset (1901).

In his Sundown (1894, Smithsonian American Art Museum), landscape painter George Inness also departed from the reassurance provided by Durand’s Kindred Spirits, although Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School. The scene in Sundown is not an attractive gorge in the Catskills or a grand mountain vista, but a rundown farm. The mood that prevails is one of stillness, even sadness, a response to the devastation and social disruption brought about by the Civil War. This mood was found in much American painting at the end of the 19th century. Inness was a follower of the religious philosophy of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who taught that God was present throughout nature. The mystical aspects of Swedenborg’s beliefs may have contributed to the quiet, poetic tenor of Inness’s late work.

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