Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	American Backgrounds In the coastal frontier settlements of the still savage New World of the seventeenth century, there were American artists at work producing what has become to the twentieth-century American a priceless gallery of "ancestors." Scores if not hundreds of these portraits were painted, all the way from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Carolina. Most of their significance went unnoted by the wider art public until recently when, in the general reappraisal of all art, they began to stand out as representing a distinguished primitivism as well as a quality that is distinctively American. Artists had come to America with the earliest pioneers, and continued to come, bringing some acquaintance with the prevailing art practices of Western Europe--Flemish, Dutch, and French--and there are reminiscences of various masters and schools in much of the early American portraiture. The Madam Freake and Baby Mary, of 1675, now in the Worcester Art Museum, is curiously reminiscent of certain medieval French sculptures even while achieving a fresh expressiveness that has caused one critic to call it the "American Mother and Child." Some of the earliest and most familiar portraits are in the style of Van Dyck. Their factualism is the quality achieved by artists whenever they are obliged by new environments and new demands to strike out for the straightest and most economical and most vigorous accounts they are capable of producing of what they see and feel of the sitters' characters. The most striking characteristic of all such work is the uncompromising integrity of the "likeness"--the countenance and the features. The second is the stiff, hard-edged composition in which the figure is solidly centered. The subject is often shown against an unrelieved background; but, as often, there are background details added bluntly to amplify the record of the sitter's character and position in life: the sailing ship in the self-portrait of Captain Thomas Smith, owned by the American Antiquarian Society; the coat of arms and the military fortifications in the portrait of Major Thomas Savage painted by the same artist, now in a private collection. The ordering of these descriptive details and their subordination to a broad and simple pictorial unity by the often unknown artist afford one of the most striking characteristics to the early likenesses. This may be observed in the clerical garb of the Reverend John Williams in the Deerfield Memorial, at Deerfield, or in the stiff collar, the open book, and the pen of the Reverend John Cotton, in the Connecticut Historical Society collection at Hartford. Distortion of the kind that shocked conventional observers in some post-Impressionist work is often used intuitively in these early paintings as the artist's means of emphasizing some of the sitter's features at the expense of others or by reason of his arbitrary arrangement of the figure in the interest of design. The Ann Pollard ( Massachusetts Historical Society) is a rare and amusing example of distortion. The Mistress Paddy Wensley in the collection of the Pilgrim Society, Plymouth, shows the anonymous Puritan artist's unpuritanical delight in the sheer beauty of linear rhythms and his feeling for fine stuffs, colored fabrics, and gay flowers as a setting for feminine character. The thirty-eight authenticated portraits painted by nativeborn Americans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before 1700, exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the mid-thirties and now the subject of a small literature of their own, are central to the study of our American primogeniture in art--a study being furthered by other important museums in the wider field. This native American art is not unrelated in spirit to that of Giotto and the Sienese, who wrought out a new conception of painted form to meet a new function. Their world still retained the medieval conviction that had given its character to the art of thirteenthcentury Italy, that is, the conviction that art is the fine flower of artisanship and craftsmanship and not an exercise of individual sensibility for art's sake. Many colonial portraitists were house or coach painters, cabinetmakers, builders, or engravers, or were followers of trades and professions unrelated to the painter's craft, who could show the skill and the talent to turn out acceptable likenesses on demand. The plastic power, the forthrightness, and the clarity of intention of America's pre-Georgian portraiture reveal to the appreciative twentieth-century critic, an unself-conscious, often intuitive gift on the artist's part of communicating his observations and ideas--a gift that was largely lost to the subsequent art of America and of the Western world, and that twentieth-century art feels the need of recovering. This body of portraiture is to be classed with the antique arts of the Americas, as with other of our recently revalued aesthetic inheritance, because it has the same qualities of inner integrity and outer plastic expressiveness. Meantime, Robert Feke ( 1705-about 1750) and Joseph Badger ( 1708-1765) were the most conspicuous figures in the period of transition which related early American "likenesses" to the cosmopolitan and aristocratic portraiture which was to give the New World recognition in international art. The spread of wealth and of a taste for luxurious living in the colonies from the time of Queen Anne attracted European artists, who brought a conception of contemporary European practice and professional standards, providing teachers and study material for young men and gradually influencing the working conditions of artisan-artists and untaught likeness makers. One John Durand advertised in New York in 1767 and thereafter that he would teach drawing cheap to compensate for his "lack of universal knowledge." John Singleton Copley ( 1737-1815) and Ralph Earl ( 1751-1801) were the brilliant makers of the Georgian colonial era of portraiture. Copley became famous and rich while still a young man in Boston, and before he went to London, at the onset of the Revolution, he painted many of the most eminent figures of colonial American life. For strength and simplicity, and for an authentic New World elegance, his portraits excel; and, taken all together, they remain one of the ablest and most consistent records in art of any phase of America's cultural development. Copley turned Tory and remained in Europe, to become a leading figure among fashionable academic painters of the Gainsborough-Benjamin West tradition. He gained in versatility and brilliance, but lost his early power, which was the power of direct and forceful painted statement of the early likeness makers raised to the technical standards of international portraiture. He lost, in short, the quality that had marked his work as expressively American; he became a man of divided will, with the materials of his art at home, and his tools abroad; and in that, he personifies the spirit of American art after his time and for at least a century and a half. Ralph Earl was, in contrast, the only man of his era who went to Europe to study art and came home convinced that he could learn nothing in the cosmopolitan painting centers which he could use in his own further development. He had begun as an itinerant likeness maker in Massachusetts and Connecticut and, at the beginning of his career, had fought in the Revolution. His scene of the town of Concord with the troops drawn up for battle is one of a number of landscapes which he painted for an engraver and which are thought to be the first independently observed broad views of the American scene made from direct observation (a half century before the groping progress of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand was to lay the foundations for an independent professional practice of landscape painting in America). His early portraits, including the Man with a Gun and the picture of his brother, embody the vigorous, direct manner of earlier untaught men. Together with more mature and traditionally disciplined paintings, such as the Carpenter portraits in the Worcester Art Museum, these represent a conspicuous contribution of our American aesthetic heritage, one that is more widely recognized now than in his own time. His double portrait of United States Chief Justice Ellsworth and his wife, in the Wadsworth Atheneum at Hartford, is a particularly interesting example of his strength and originality. The familiar home environment of the couple is introduced into the design of the painting as revealingly as in one of the English conversation pieces of Hogarth's time, and with more plastic unity than often resulted in those days. America's untaught artists from the earliest times had known how to enrich their portraits and invest their subjects with added importance by the addition of painted background bits--the clerical collar, the sailing ship, the fine lace jabot, the coat of arms; and the best of these artists had delighted in the decorative opportunities thus offered; but Earl achieves a fine formal construction in which the Judge's library is shown, with its books and carpet and other details, and, between the couple as if seen through a window, he frames a sweeping view of the estate. Earlier Earl portraits have the stiff dignity and the rugged honesty of the older pioneering likeness makers, later ones have greater suavity, but none exceeds this in integrity of design or in a quality which it is not extravagant to call "Americanness."