America's Old Masters

 

In Colonial America the last half of the eighteenth century was a period of great flowering. Seeds that,had been planted when Co­lumbus discovered a continent and European exiles colonized it, roots that had been growing obscurely for hundreds of years burst suddenly into blossom. The revolution and the founding of a new nation were only symptoms of a fundamental deepening of the American spirit, for in diverse fields the Colonies harvested glori­ous fruits. The first liberal university and the first medical school were founded on a continent whose educational institutions had wandered in a maze of theology; scientists such as Benjamin Frank­lin and John Morgan built reputations that were known the worldover. Manufactures too began to appear in the provincial cities, and rich merchants walked with new pride down lamp-lit streets.

Naturally this flowering was largely limited to the utilitarian pursuits which had occupied preceding generations of pioneers. Cut off by sea and forest from Europe and even from neighbouring ^colonies, the settlers had gradually developed great skill in supply­ing their own requirements. Statesmen had been nurtured by the need for government and doctors by the need for medicine. Con­triving their own guns and ploughs, farmers had become mechani­cally ingenious, while their wives became expert in handicrafts, for in the wilderness the spinning wheel was as essential as the axe.

The settlers, however, had no leisure for such non-utilitarian matters as the fine arts. Since among conscious aesthetic pursuits only architecture, which supplied roofs and walls, had a real place in America's early economy, we should expect only architecture to flourish when that economy widened into America's eighteenth-century renaissance. Indeed, literature was to wait several genera­tions before it could boast names such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, while music and sculpture were almost un­known. One might assume that" painting would remain in an equally backward state.

In 1750, it is true, only obscure craftsmen painted on the North American continent: glaziers who drew primitive portraits on the side, or disgruntled Europeans, too inferior to succeed at home, who crossed the ocean to dazzle the citizens of a backward land. By 1800, however, a miraculous change had taken place. Perhaps the strangest development in all Colonial America was the develop­ment of a school of great painters. Some spent parts of their lives in England and competed successfully with Reynolds and Gains­borough, Raeburn and Lawrence; the first famous painters born on our continent enjoyed a greater European acclaim than was to come to any other American artists for at least a century. And they were not the only competent workmen of the American school; others such as Charles Willson Peale, painting almost entirely on--this side of the water, produced canvases much admired today.

This amazing story has been largely neglected by the historians of our national life. It begins with four boys, isolated from one an­other in provincial settlements, who somehow began to draw in an environment that was hostile to drawing. As the years went by, each sat at the feet of the ill-trained craftsmen who alone practised art in their communities; each dreamed of the European masters whose achievements he read about but could not study, for no great paintings had found their way to America. Finally, at least two of these young men performed a miracle: they outstripped their teach­ers and painted greater pictures than any they had seen.

Each of the painters whose lives this book discusses struggled so successfully with his barren environment that he managed at last to make the expensive journey in a sailing ship to the galleries of the Old World. Then the self-taught artist of many years' standing who was already famous in his native land saw all at once, in a wild phantasmagoria of styles and colours, the works of Raphael and Van Dyck and Rubens and a hundred more. Nor in several cases was this all. Antique statues burst upon the consciousness of those who reached Italy; Venus and Apollo stood in naked splendour before men who had never seen a nude work of art; Laocoon writhed and Niobe wept for her children. The American painters were dazzled and exalted and bewildered. Then there was the neces­sity of coming to earth again, and of painting again, now they had seen great art. Could they keep the virtues they had worked out for themselves among the forest shadows or in the quiet of provincial cities; could mature painters graft onto a self-taught style the won­der and burden of centuries?

Although they were all humbly born men rising from the people, each of America's old masters reacted very differently to the revolu-tion which dragged its trail of blood across their lives. Peale fought and Stuart ran away. Copley braved the fury of revolutionary meet­ings to preach conciliation. And West, who was already settled in England when the fight began, remained the intimate friend of George III despite his refusal to hide his sympathy for the Ameri­can rebels. Amusingly enough, it was Stuart, the only Tory among America's first great artists, who painted what was perhaps the most famous picture associated with the revolution and went down in popular history as the idealizer of Washington.

We need not be surprised that one of America's old masters was an inventor, founded an important museum of natural history, the earliest on this continent, and exhumed the first mastodon skeleton seen since the days of cavemen. Painters did not live in ivory towers in those days; far from it. Every development in one of the most exciting periods of American history was reflected in the lives and the work of America's old masters. Their portraits and historical paintings have kept for ever visible the men and the events asso­ciated with the birth of a great nation.

Dedicated to history not art criticism, to biography r\ot the evalu­ation of pictures, this book attempts to tell the story of four amazing lives. In discussing the achievements of these men, we shall try to show how their paintings succeeded or failed in the eyes of their contemporaries and according to the standards* of their own school, leaving to writers more skilled in such matters the evaluation of their work according to some universal principle of aesthetics. It is not our object to make judgments, but to resurrect from the ob­scurity, of time the men behind the canvases that gave American art its first stature in the world.