Art in America: A Critical and Historial Sketch

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ivity became apparent, and in 1815 the North American Review was founded. We mention this fact, although a literary event, as indicating the point in time when the nebulous character of the various intellectual influences and tendencies of the nation b

riod of our art history and the dawn of its successor; for notwithstanding the excellence of Stuart's art, and the virile character of the art of some of his contemporaries, yet their efforts had been spasmodic and unequal; much of it had b

ce 1801. With the new institution was collected the nucleus of a gallery of paintings and casts; and from the outset the idea s

E PEG."-[H

ave nourished its growth, and which have made it a worthy forerunner of new methods for expressing the artistic yearnings of those who are to follow in years to come. It has indicated a notable advance in our art; it has, in spite of its weakness or imitation of foreign conventionalisms, possessed certain tra

our literature of the same period; and, like our national civilization, presents a singular reaching a

d finally in painting. We have entirely reversed this order. The unsettled character of the population-especially at the time when emigration from the Eastern to the Western States caused a general movement from State to State-together with the abundance of lumber at that time, evidently offered no opportunity or demand for any but the rudest and most rapidly constru

fuller expression soon after the new Republic had declared its independence; and, with scarce any patronage from the Govern

t has, until recently, prevented the concentration of effort which might lead to grand results and schools. It has been a blessing, because individual expression has thus found a vent, and mannerism has not yet become a conventional net, so thrown around our art as to prevent free action and growth. The Ameri

agitated and diverse; a general restlessness has characterized the community-a vast intellectual discontent with the present. Although strongly moved by pride of country, we have also been keenly sensitive to foreign influences, and have received impressions f

ense of beauty. With us it has been quite otherwise; for the artists have been in advance of public sentiment, and have had the misfortune to be forced to wait until the people could come up to them. In addition to the fact that in New England Puritan influences were at first opposed to art, the restless, surging, unequal, widely differing character of our people, brought face to face with the elementary problems of existence, founding new forms of government, a

RKE GODWIN.-[T

To accuse American artists, as a class, of being mercenary-a charge made quite too often-is really something akin to irony, so much more successful pecuniarily would the majority of them have been in mercantile pursuits. The heroism of our early painters, struggling, in obscure corners of the country, for opport

e forces which formed the careful, minute, painstaking style of much of our landscape art. We refer to the fact that many of the best of our early painters were f

thstanding the friendly relations between the United States and France, our art, when it was first looking to Europe for direction, should not have come in contact with that of France, which at that time, led by Gericault, Rousseau, Troyon, Delacroix, and other rising men, was becoming the greatest pictorial school since the Renais

American artist, we might find it was a powerful contributor to the formation of the early style of the landscape artists who followed him to Italy. This bias was also greatly assisted by the many paintings imported at that time from the Italian peninsula, which were either originals, bought cheaply during the disturbances which then convulsed Europe, or copies of more or

ETCHER HARPER-

d for a mere song by a faculty who were ignorant of their value, and thought they might at the same time aid morality and add an honest penny to the funds of the institution by selling its precious nudities, and thus remove them from the student'

inent feature of English art. May we not also trace to English literature the bias which unconsciously led our painters to turn their attention to landscape with a unanimity that has until recently made our pictorial art distinctively a school of landscape painting? Cowper, Byron, and Wordsworth introduced landscape into poetry, and undoubtedly impelled English art in the same direction; and it was exactly at that time tha

art of this century are illustrated with especial force by five portrait, figure, and landscape-painters, w

HEAD.-[G.

rding, who engaged him to paint the portrait of Mrs. Harding, and took his first art-lesson while looking over the artist's shoulder; and his first crude attempts so fascinated him that he at once adopted art as a profession, and in six months painted one hundred likenesses, such as they were, at twenty-five dollars each, and then settled in Boston, where he seems to have been taken up with characteristic enthusiasm. On going to England, Harding, notwithstanding the few advantages he had enjoyed, seemed to compare so favorably with portrait-painters there that he was patronized by the first noblemen of the land. Although belonging also to the latter part of the period immediately preceding that

s, he enjoyed advantages of early training superior to those of most of our painters of that day. Exceedingly versatile, and excelling in miniature, and doing fairly well in genre and landscape, Inman will be best known in future year

ng Elliott, Baker, Hicks, Le Clear, Huntington, and Page, the contemporaries of Healy, Ames, Hunt, and Staigg, of Boston, and Sully, of Philadelphia-all a

F PARIS."-[HENR

y and freshness of color and masterly control of pigments; but he was scarcely more vigorous than Elliott in the wondrous faculty of grasping character. Herein lay this artist's strength. He read the heart of the man he portrayed, and gave us not merely a faithful likeness of his outward features, but an epitome of his intellectual life and traits, almost clutching and bringing to light his most secret thoughts. In studying the portraits of Elliott we learn to analyze and to discern the essential and irreconcilab

of American feminine beauty. The miniatures of Staigg are also among the most winning works of the sort produced by our art. Among other

materials as he found them, but has been an experimentalist and a theorist as well, and therefore belongs properly to more recent phases of our art. Thus, wh

ceeded sometimes to a degree which, if far below that of the masters whom he studied, was yet in advance of most of such art as has been executed by American painte

d Inman, he is better known by the men of this generation as a pleasing portrait-painter; but the most important of his early efforts were in what might be called a semi-literary style in genre and historical a

nt, the son of a farmer on Long Island. Associated first with his brother as a sign-painter, he eventually, in 1828, took up genre painting. Mount lacked ambition, as he himself confessed; he was too easily influenced by the rapidly won approval of the public to cease improving his style, and early returned to his farm on Long Island. Mount was not remarkable as a colorist, although it is quite possible he might have succeeded as such with superior advantages; but he was in other respects a man of genius, who as such has not been surpassed by the numerous genre artists whom he preceded, and to whom he showe

-[DANIEL H

tator of foreign and classic art, and showing independence of thought in his practice and choice of subjects, Weir's style is pleasing rather than vigorous and original. It shows care and loving patience, as of one who appreciates the dignity of his profession, but no marked imaginative force, nor does he introduce or suggest any new truths. Such a massive composition, however, as the "Sailing of the Pilg

"-[WILLIAM S

me to the subject of landscape-painting, we enter upon a field in which originality of style is apparent, and a certain consistency and harmony of effort. Minds of large reserve power meet us at the outset, moved by strong and earnest convictions, and often expressing their thoughts in methods entirely their own. Thoroughly, almost fanatically, national by nature, even when their art shows traces of foreign influence, and drawing their subjects from their native

rand. Although the youngest of the three, the first seems to have antedated Doughty by a few months in adopting this branch of art

ore his greatest works-through all the imperfections of his art, through all the faltering methods with which his genius sought to express itself-that a vast mind here sought feebly to utter great thoughts (which he has doubtless already learned to utter with more truth in another world); we see that unmistakab

E VEIL"-[R

pencil; and the tinting of wall-paper in his father's factory at Steubenville, Ohio, gave him a slight practice in the harmony of colors. In the mean time he took up engraving, but was diverted from this pursuit by a travelling German portrait-painter, who gave him a few lessons in the use of oil-colors. He began with portraiture, and resolved to be an artist, although the failure of his father's business brought the whole family on him for support.

he National Academy of Design was founded in 1828, Cole and Doughty were simultaneously winning success, and giving a

ch an influence on the great school of French landscape art which has since succeeded. It is interesting to think what would have been the character of our landscape art if Cole had been favorably impressed by the broad and vigorou

its, and an attempt sometimes at dramatic force which occasionally lapses into mere sensationalism. But in all his compositions there are evident a rapturous love of nature, and the energy and yearning of a mind seeking to find expression for a vast ideal. Cole was what very few of our artists have been-an idealist. The work by which he will be longest and best remembered in the art of his country is the noble series called the "Course of Empire," consisting of five paintings, representing a nation's rise, progress, decline, and fall, and the change which comes over the abandoned scenery as the once superb capital returns to the wildness and solitude of nature. The last of the series, entitled "Desolation"-a gray silent waste, haunted by the bittern, with here and there a crumbling column reflected in the deserted harbor, where gleaming fleets once fl

"THE COURSE OF EMPIR

he simplicity it shows, but would tend to bring the efforts of these artists into contempt if the results had not often justified their audacity, for they were sometimes men of remarkable ability. There have been many greater landscape-painters than Doughty, but few who have done so well with such meagre opportunities for instruction. He seems, also, to have bee

at artist in the sum of his intellectual powers, we discover in him a different quality of mind. Similar as they are in high moral purpose and a profound reverence for the Creator, as represented in his works, Cole was the

NATURE.-[A.

with the success won thus far, Durand, in his thirty-eighth year, directed his efforts to landscape-painting, and at once became not only a pioneer but a master in this department. The care he had been obliged to give to engraving was undoubtedly of great assistance to him in enabling him to render the lines of a composition with truth; while his practice of studying character in portraiture gave him insight into the individuality of trees-he invested them with a humanity like that which the ancient Greeks gave to their for

HORE."-BEVERLY BEA

ensett. He was fully as original as Durand, and saw and represented nature in his own language. His methods of rendering a bit of landscape were tender and harmonious, and entirely free from any attempt at sensationalism. So marked was the latter characteristic especially, that before the great modern question of the values began to arouse much attention in the ateliers of Paris, Kensett had already grasped the perception of a theory of art practice which has since become so prominent in foreign art; although, naturally, it is not in all his canvases that this attempt to interpret the true relations of objects in nature is equally evident. We see

E OF WILLIAM TELL."

sing colors was formed, to a certain extent, on that of the Italian landscape art of the time; and, while often brilliant and poetic, reminds us sometimes of the studio rather than of the free, pure, magical opulence of the atmosphere and sunlight of the scenery he portrayed. It can be frankly conceded, however, that he has been no slavish copyist of a style; but while acknowledging the