Ten years ago, Susan Rather published her book, “The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era,” which explores American artists and the public perception of artists during the 18th and early 19th centuries, including the evolution of art making from status as a trade to a “fine art.”
As the nation marks its 250th anniversary this weekend, hear from Rather about what it meant to be an artist in 1776 and the ways in which American art and artists began to take on their own identity. Read on to learn more.
What did the art scene look like and what did it mean to be an artist during the time of the revolution?
Rather: It did not look like anything that we today would recognize. The term “fine arts” historically connotes certain types of practices — painting, sculpture, architecture, later printmaking — that the earliest academies of art, beginning in the later 16th century, defined as gentlemanly, intellectual pursuits. That occurred much later in Great Britain and its North American colonies, where an older, pre-Renaissance conception of artists persisted deep into the 18th century. In that view, all persons who worked with their hands were grouped as artisans or tradesmen (the word craftsmen came into use later and is a bit too romanticized to be useful), by contrast to professions that had a strongly intellectual component, like law and ministry.
That began to change around 1750, a quarter century before the Revolution, but slowly. Around 1765, one hugely prominent and sought-after artist complained in a letter that his fellow Bostonians classed him with carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers. Tellingly, we find among trade advertisements in newspapers quite a few notices placed by painters seeking work. Imagine Picasso or Pollock doing that! So this whole idea of the capital-A artist did not really apply.
Ambitious Anglophone artists also chafed at the fact that, in their world, the type of painting most in demand was portraiture. They knew from the theoretical treatises that began to emerge alongside academies of fine arts that certain subjects were framed as more important than others. At the top were history, religion, mythology, and allegory because those scenes had to be invented or imagined and thus required learning and creativity.
Conversely, portraiture ranked low, because portraitists were thought to “merely” copy nature. A portraitist’s work is also necessarily “bespoke,” or made to order for the individual client. Some portraitists even wryly referred to themselves as “painter tailors,” a quip that also speaks to the greater importance to clients of beautifully rendered clothing in their pictures than faces! Bottom line: if portraitists wanted to get paid, they had to do exactly what their clients wanted, leaving little room for the exercise of the mind (or so the argument went).
With the Revolution, some artists saw real opportunities to paint history, most famously John Trumbull, who had himself served in the continental army. Anyone who has been in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda has seen the monumental versions of four key Revolutionary scenes that he’d first sketched out in the 1780s, just after its conclusion. It took more fully three decades for him to persuade Congress of their value to the nation. In fact, it was an open question among many as to whether the arts in general had any value in a republic. Artists strenuously argued that they did.
When did art begin to look “American” and what did that mean? What was influencing artists’ style?
Rather: I would not say that there was a recognizable American style at that time or that anyone even thought of developing one. Europe was the absolute touchstone in terms of subject matter and style throughout the 19th century and most highly ambitious artists went there to train, as there really weren’t even academies of art on these shores, at least not in any form we would recognize.
But things did begin to change as a wave of American pride swept the nation beginning in the 1820s, a decade that culminated politically in the election of Andrew Jackson. (I am of course simplifying in all my comment remarks changes that occurred in fits and starts – and not without contest.)
Artists and others began to look around and say, “We have things Europe doesn’t have. The European landscape has been tamed by millennia of settlement, with all the forests cut down in England and remains of the human civilizations decaying all over Italy. But we are a fresh new country, and we have pristine land as far as one can travel. This is nature primeval, and we’re going to celebrate it in paint.”
So, by around 1830, American landscape had supplanted portraiture as the preeminent subject for painters, along with scenes of American life and manners, like William Sidney Mount’s paintings of farmers on rural Long Island or George Caleb Bingham’s painting about U.S. electoral processes of the 1840s (though those contained quite a bit of not-so-veiled criticism). Although even then, we can’t speak of a distinctively American style, the subjects trumpet ‘America,’ hand-in-hand with American expansionism and the ideology of manifest destiny.
