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Among the men who went to London to join the AngloAmerican school of Benjamin West, the Pennsylvania Quaker, and to paint in the style of the British Royal Academy of which West became president, were John Trumbull, William Dunlap, Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Sully, and Samuel F. B. Morse. Trumbull ( 1756-1843) of Connecticut painted the Battle of Bunker Hill and the group picture of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, now both in the Yale University Gallery of Fine Arts, and became the first president of the American Academy established in 1808 on the model of the British Royal Academy. William Dunlap failed to become the first-class artist of his ambitious youthful dreams, but produced in maturer years his History of the Arts of Design in America, still our most authentic source book for engaging details of the art and the lives of the men who first brought America recognition in the fields of painting and sculpture. Charles Willson Peale ( 1741-1827) was an inventive genius, endowed with a colorful personality and a powerful creative imagination; and if his early portraiture appears now to have been technically incompetent and his late work a little empty and overfine, he nevertheless stands out brightly among the antecedents of twentiethcentury functional art; and before the history of industrial design is finally written, it may go all the way back to him as a conspicuous forerunner. When a student at the West school in London, Peale witnessed a political disturbance of the kind that preceded the Revolution, and it caused him to swear that he would "never again take off his hat to the King," and to return to his native land. He raised a company and was its commander in Washington's army. It has been said that he served the Father of Our Country but moderately well before posterity, by painting him pig-eyed in the early portrait of that period; and, at a much later time, by devising for him a set of artificial teeth of wood which, however ingenious an achievement, was responsible for the forbidding and unnatural set of the lower part of the face as seen in the official portraits. Peale organized and operated America's first notable museum, a scheme upon which he had embarked in the enthusiasm aroused by the unearthing of a mastodon in Connecticut and his discovery that he could purchase the marvel and take it home to Philadelphia. A large, late self-portrait now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art shows an ample view of his pioneering center of public education in the new popular science. His pioneer efforts to provide art exhibitions for his home city, in 1795, led to the establishment, a decade later, of the Pennsylvania Academy. The name Gilbert Stuart ( 1755-1828) is familiarly linked with those of Earl and Copley as representing the finest flowering of Georgian colonial taste. Stuart of Newport, of Philadelphia, of London painted the portraits of great personages on both sides of the ocean, including the famous portrait of President Washington now in the Boston Athenaeum. As an old man in Boston, he still executed a few commissions in the same thin, elegant color and with the same distinguished simplicity as in his heyday in London, where, rumor said, he once snubbed Dr. Johnson publicly to impress friends from Virginia with his own importance. Rumor also said that in his late years he made many copies of his own portraits of Washington and sold them for the ready cash which was always eluding him, even in the great days. If Earl and Copley were the figures with which a glorious cultural era arose, Stuart was to a degree a personification of that era's decline. Stuart it was who in his old days made the bitter epigram that the time would soon come when you couldn't kick a dog kennel without seeing an artist run out. Long before his death and the end of the eighteen twenties, foreshadowings came of the confused eclecticism that was to prevail in American art throughout the century and into our own. William Sidney Mount of Long Island had begun his career as a pioneer painter of American genre, following sincerely and sometimes obviously the Dutch Little Masters. Thomas Cole had already gone up into the Hudson River Valley, where he was attempting to capture the poetic spirit of the American wilds and to give American nature painting an independent professional status comparable with that native writers had begun to give to a romantic and poetic literature of similar inspiration. Chester Harding ( 1792-1866) was the most conspicuous continuer of the picture-making tradition of the early, untaught journeymen painters. He was a native Massachusetts backwoodsman who had made and peddled chairs and limned likenesses on the Middle Border. His homely and forthright portraits appealed to a public bored by overmuch show of elegance. He became the vogue in Boston as Stuart declined in favor, and in London where the GainsboroughReynolds-West tradition had waned. His painting became more urbane without losing its vigor and directness. Sentimental and elegant paintings in the British tradition gave place to sentimental and homely illustrations of American life; the great colorful battle scenes and allegories of the Benjamin West school, popular in America as in Europe, gave way before equally large landscapes designed to dramatize the scenic marvels of the country. The Old Kentucky Home of Eastman Johnson, now in the New York Public Library, and the showy, "acre-wide" paintings of the Rocky Mountains or the Yosemite Valley by Albert Bierstadt are typical examples of the overworked realism that prevailed in popular painting in nineteenth-century America. Influences from Holland, Düsseldorf, and Munich, and an increasing number of sources, mingled, while the waning British tradition of sweet and fine portraiture had as its last representative Thomas Sully, who lived on until the seventies, and painted over 2,500 portraits. Samuel F. B. Morse ( 1781-1872) was one of the young men of the nineteenth century who came under the spell of European neoClassicism, as had Thomas Jefferson, as had John Vanderlyn before him. Morse went daily, while a student at the West school in London, to sketch the Elgin marbles, and finally came home filled with dreams of a New World empire which should revive the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome; convinced, he said, that a full company of American artists were ready to create works equal to those of Michelangelo and Raphael, and that he was destined to be the greatest among them. He was an able artist, as his portrait of Lafayette in the City Hall in New York and that of Robert De Forest in the National Museum in Buenos Aires show; and the tragedy of his early life was that he failed to make a living because British-inspired portraiture had had its day. The sense of failure did not entirely leave him even at the end of his life, after he had become a figure of world renown through inventing the telegraph. Horatio Greenough ( 1805-1852) was the first American sculptor to study in Italy. Like Morse, like William Wetmore Story ( 18191895), he cherished the ideal of a New World art in which the antique ideals should live again. Both Greenough and Story absorbed decadent Italian ideals and produced work without plastic significance, as most of the Western World now appears to have been doing; but Story anticipated Seurat in attempting to envisage a logical formula for perfect creations, while Greenough apprehended the aesthetic values of typical American constructions which artists are only today striving to capture and to assimilate into their art. The Pythian Apollo, Story recalled, had been wrought according to a system of ideal proportions, one half in the Studio of Telekias at Samos and the other in the workshop of Theodorus in Ephesus, and the work had emerged "as by one hand." This seemed to him a likely point of departure in new efforts to recover the secret of perfection in art. Greenough, back home lecturing at Harvard in the eighteen twenties--after gazing on Athenian marbles and the Florentine art which had caused him to burst into tears because of its beauty--saw visions of a comparable achievement developing from the fine functional integrity of the American clipper ship and the colonial farmhouse, when our pioneer artisanship and craftsmanship had had time to come to flower in art. He saw that the neo-Classic structures that were being built on the business streets of American cities were a forced and artificial blossoming that violated the Greek spirit. But the integrating vision, the power to accept the terms set by the American way of life, were absent, then and throughout the nineteenth century. In sculpture more than in painting, a shallow realism and a false sentimentality prevailed, and in these the early promise of an indigenous sculptural art from beginnings in shipbuilding and architecture, furniture making, stonecutting, and the practical turning of earthenware pots was lost sight of for the time, as completely as was the promise in the early native portraiture.