The Artist in American Society, the Formative Years
The Artist in American Society, the Formative Years: 1790-1960 by Neil Harris. (Goerge Braziller, 1966)
The colonial painter wasn’t so much an artist as an artisan. He painted signs, crockery, fire buckets, and anything else he could to make a living.
If he were particularly ambitious, he might farm himself out to small towns like Albany, NY, and offer to paint portraits for a reasonable fee, or send panoramas on tour with sideshow-type acts. If he succeeded in the minor leagues, he might try his hand in a big Eastern city like Boston, Philadelphia, or New York.
After the Revolutionary War, painting was impressed into the service of patriotism. The trouble with painting history in America was that scenes of speechifying or signing documents were not terribly exciting. Thrilling moments were often violent ones — certainly not the tension-in-repose of the Classical ideal.
Landscapes, it seems, became more prevalent during the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath as alternatives to the mechanized world. Interestingly enough, scenes of the cities where artists lived and worked were not painted until after the Civil War.
The Classical Ideal pursued through Romantic detail, the general revealed by the specific — history in the 18th century and nature in the 19th — this became the goal of the New World artist (15)
For most of this period, artists looked to Europe for models and inspiration. Early on, they had little direct access to foreign art. They might read a description or see a black-and-white, scaled-down engraving, possibly a plaster cast. Artists like Benjamin West got grand ideas about the Role of the Artist from biographies of famous Europeans.
Actual travel to Europe was risky and expensive. It was the highpoint of a career, and to finance it, artists might collect money in advance for copies of famous works that they would paint while abroad. Some, like West and John Singleton Copley, never came home. The a wealth of responses to foreign art from writers like Hawthorne and Stowe, members of the clergy, and other travelers.
Responses from people of the day are the chief pleasure of this volume by Harris, professor emeritus of history at University of Chicago. They can also make for rather slow reading, a “some people said this, but others said this” narrative.
It’s not quite as streamlined as his later book, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (1973), although it does strike a balance between trends and the individual, often contradictory strands of thought that complicate them.
I particularly enjoyed the peek into New York boardinghouses filled with artists on the make. As this book makes clear, artists squabbled and succeeded in communities peopled by moralists, journalists, educators, potential patrons, and viewers of all stripes.
