Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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drawing and painting in its curriculum. At the prestigious Nazareth Hall, drawing was a mandatory and integral part of the curriculum. In an 1815 poem celebrating the school’s effect on its students, the principal W. H. Van Vleck ranked the transformative power of drawing alongside that of the classics:
There first with rapt’rous eye, the page sublime
Of classic Rome and Greece I wandered o’er;
Now dared with, with venturous pencil, to portray
Fair Nature’s smiling face in mimic hues. …
Clearly, the ability to draw signified. But how exactly?67
The extraordinarily rich collection of surviving student drawings from Nazareth Hall can suggest some answers to that question. The young men who attended Nazareth Hall between 1785 and 1830, much like their female counterparts at academies throughout the country, learned to draw by copying examples selected by their teachers. And by the 1810s, a small number of students produced images analogous to the ones painted and embroidered by female students—botanical drawings complemented by Latin names and root systems, landscapes, and genre scenes. One young man, whose ambition outstripped his talent, painted a copy of Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, an image that had circulated widely through the colonies as an engraved print. Yet the majority of images produced at Nazareth Hall bear little resemblance to these polished, detailed images and even less resemblance to the painted and embroidered pictures that young women created.68 The lion’s share of the young men who learned to draw at Nazareth Hall did not reproduce complete images, much less images that thematized an expansive, transatlantic print culture. Instead, their training conformed more or less to the trajectory advocated in the drawing manuals that circulated on the continent and in Britain from the sixteenth century on. (In this case, the manual was the multivolume treatise written by Preissler, who served as the director of the Nuremburg Academy of Art in the early eighteenth century.) Academic artists and drawing masters began with the assumption that pictorial representation unfolded systematically; perceptual deconstruction preceded pictorial reconstruction. A draftsman first learned to break complex forms down into composite parts, which were in turn reduced to the most basic geometric shapes, lines, and proportions. Only after mastering the pieces, after learning to recognize and reproduce the basic elements of each constituent element, could the artist aspire to the whole. The studies of eyes, heads, and feet completed by the Nazareth Hall students stand at a midpoint in this trajectory. The young draftsmen have moved beyond curved lines, geometric shapes, and basic outlines; they stop short of full compositions. The drawings do not signal an interrupted process; the students have progressed as far as their teacher intended. The schematic, formulaic figure studies that the students completed were of a piece with their architectural drawings, which aimed at familiarizing them with classical styles and proportions and the basic principles of mensuration.69
Figure 9. Charles Schweiniz was one of many students at Nazareth Hall to copy this head from Johann Daniel Preissler’s drawing manual. Nazareth, PA, 1789. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.
This was not preprofessional training; it did not impart a salable skill. Instead, the lessons were as much about learning to observe and to recognize as learning to draw.70 These exercises, which had become a routine component of an English gentleman’s education by the first half of the eighteenth century, taught republican gentlemen to see with a draftsman’s eye. This carefully schooled perception was simultaneously a physical and intellectual process. It was likewise a metaphor for a way of being in the world. It enabled individuals to look beyond incidental variations and petty distinctions and seek out the transcendent and the universal in nature and society. It resonated with scientific convictions that pictorial representation could mirror a legible natural world. Of course, this visual proficiency was as prescriptive as it was mimetic. It instilled a set of standards that could be used for judging artistic representations and for assessing the merits of real objects and individuals. Just as important, the visual skills taught through drawing lessons held out the distinctly republican promise of access. The elegantly reasoned world represented in sketches of faces and columns is within the reach of diligent schoolboys.
Figure 10. Ludwig Schweiniz drew this Tuscan column to demonstrate his familiarity with the classical orders of architecture for an examination. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.
Setting the extant drawings from Nazareth Hall alongside abundant examples of schoolgirl art, we can begin to see how the gendered production of art shaped the cultural meanings of emulation. The male students’ drawings, like the engravings in Preissler’s manual, do not depict any particular face, foot, or column. Instead, they describe a series of ideal types. Recapitulating assumptions that stood at the center of the Enlightenment project, the drawings’ techniques and subjects champion the universal over the particular. The draftsmen are not intended to develop individual styles; their studies bear only the most attenuated relation to specific objects. Drawing lessons are analogous to moral philosophy; sketches of eyes and columns form a pictorial corollary to the universalizing maxims that students transcribed into their commonplace books.
Young women’s pictures gesture toward a closely related intellectual milieu, the transatlantic world of polite letters. And, like the young men’s drawings, their painted and stitched pictures are predicated on emulation. But where young men’s art proclaims universal truths, young women’s art illustrates narrative. It figures contexts and characters, choices and dilemmas. Just as important, young women’s art concretizes and elaborates its origins in the material world in ways that young men’s art does not. Women’s pictures reproduce particular heroines drawn from particular engraved prints and particular illustrated volumes, insisting on the material underpinnings of the republic of letters. More than that, it trumpets their access to exclusive visual resources and expensive materials. If male students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas, female students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas-as-commodities. Depictions of Palemon and Lavinia or of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, with their tiny stitches and delicate washes of color, inscribed the American republic not as a republic of letters but as a republic of taste, where virtue resided in the propertied discernment of the connoisseur rather than the earnest, workaday morality of the artisan.
This was hardly a neutral substitution. Literary critic Michael Warner has famously argued that, in the years following the Revolution, growing numbers of Americans laid claim to print culture as a means of articulating their citizenship and defining their place in an emergent public sphere. But if these men and women aggressively pursued books and periodicals, they did not gain access to costly illustrated books; they enjoyed far less exposure to fine, imported engravings. Female students’ grandest productions underscored the fact that print cultures, like the citizens who participated in them, were not equal. Culled from exclusive books and prints, fashioned in silk and watercolor, and executed by graceful young ladies, “schoolgirl” art ensured that the highly restrictive republic of taste would work to counter the more protean republic of letters.71
Exhibiting Taste
An academy education, encompassing art and composition, penmanship and politeness, was ultimately calculated to culminate in the production of a virtuous citizenry. More immediately, though, it culminated in the production of academy examinations and exhibitions, where students displayed the fruits of their learning before a public audience. Colonial colleges had long sponsored public commencement ceremonies. But in the years following the Revolution, with the growing insistence on the connections between the quality of education and the health of the republic, examinations and exhibitions became more common, more public, and more elaborate. As rituals, examinations were intended both to demonstrate that students were fit to join a republican culture and to provide an idealized picture of that republican culture. The academy exhibition was the public sphere writ small.
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