Aesthetic Entrepreneurs

      In the spring of 1806, Ethan Allen Greenwood traveled from New York City to Hanover, New Hampshire, for his final term at Dartmouth College. Like so many of his peers, Greenwood’s years at college had been interrupted by stints teaching at regional academies in order to earn money for his own education. And like so many of his ambitious peers, he anticipated a career in law. But Greenwood was also an aspiring painter and a voracious consumer of culture, and culture was the purpose of the winter he had just spent in New York. While he was in the city, he read a “great deal.” He frequented the theater, where he saw Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, School for Scandal, and a production of Hamlet starring Thomas Apthorpe Cooper, one of the most acclaimed actors on the American stage. He went to see the nation’s largest pipe organ before it was shipped to a church in Philadelphia. He attended a variety of churches and visited the New York Academy of the Fine Arts. But mostly Ethan Allen Greenwood painted. He had arranged to study with the celebrated artist Edward Savage, best known now for the painting The Washington Family. Strapped for cash, Greenwood offset the cost of his training by offering drawing and painting lessons to Savage’s daughters. By the end of his tenure with Savage, he had painted copies of ten portraits “among which was Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, head of Washington, & [Gilbert] Stuarts full length of Washington, Cleopatra & others” in addition to “painting my own likeness.”

      Back in New Hampshire, Greenwood determined to make a name for himself by turning the fruits of his New York stay into an exhibition. He displayed the portraits he had painted alongside the prints he had purchased in his college rooms and invited all of Dartmouth to admire his accomplishments. To Greenwood’s delight, “the government of [the] college, their families, & some other ladies called … to see my pictures” and several of the “ladies” stayed on to have their profiles taken. That April day, the college student became newly visible to Hanover’s better sort. But he also became visible in new ways—as a painter who could render a likeness, as a connoisseur whose taste could compel and instruct, and as a painted face, as the object of others’ discerning looks.¹ The memory of that heady afternoon may well have stuck in Greenwood’s mind, for by 1813 he was ready to turn his back on the law and declare that his “attention now will be given strictly to painting.” He spent the following five years painting hundreds of portraits; purchasing prints, books, and statuary at auctions; and looking—at art, at curiosities, at entertainments. In 1818, he bought the contents of Edward Savage’s museum in order to form the core of his New England Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened its doors in Boston on July 4.² Launching a career as a museum proprietor at the age of thirty-nine, Ethan Allen Greenwood had finally realized the promise of his college exhibition.

      To a large extent, the American republic of taste depended on the efforts of individuals like Greenwood. As producers and impresarios, proprietors and teachers, their unlikely careers contributed much to the efflorescence of aesthetic objects and experiences following the Revolution. They catered to the needs and desires of men and women whose appetites for taste had been whetted by an academy stint. Perhaps more important, they helped extend that appetite to people whose fortunes or life courses ruled out the kind of formal aesthetic education promoted within academies. Their success depended on their ability to surmount a series of challenges and hone a battery of seemingly unrelated skills.³

      Ethan Allen Greenwood offers a case in point. Before he could begin to imagine a vocation in the arts, he had to acquire a painter’s technical, manual skills. In addition to training his hands, he needed to train his eye, to cultivate an intuitive appreciation for the beautiful, the curious, the instructive. He needed to know, immediately, what kinds of images and objects would appeal to his patrons’ tastes. He also needed to convince them that he was as good with his eyes as he was with his brush: As a portrait painter, he needed to be able to seize on the traits that would render sitters’ character visible on canvas; as a museum owner, he was responsible for curating the exhibits that would entertain visitors’ eyes. Skill and taste, however, were not sufficient. Turning portraits and exhibits into cash required both the careful management of existing markets and cultivation of new ones. Success as a portrait painter and museum keeper demanded that Ethan Allen Greenwood become an aesthetic entrepreneur.

      To describe Greenwood and his peers as aesthetic entrepreneurs is to capture the dual elements of their careers, to situate their lives in the history of looking as well as in the history of laboring and commerce.⁴ On the one hand, Greenwood was simultaneously a product of the period’s deep preoccupation with taste and a promoter of its rich visual culture. His career as a portrait painter and museum proprietor was made possible by a society that had embraced the sort of aesthetic precepts promoted by academies and seminaries. He found his clientele among a generation of women and men who were adamant about the cultural and political importance of taste, even if they were sometimes vague on its qualifying characteristics. Greenwood’s patrons literally looked for new objects and spectacles upon which to exercise their taste just as they looked to print culture and educational institutions to legitimate it. Indeed, it was precisely this growing market for taste, manifested in multiple forms, that enabled many men (and more than a few women) to seek out careers as painters, art teachers, museum proprietors, or critics. This preoccupation with taste and visuality did more than expand consumer markets and open up employment opportunities. It also stood at the center of artists’ self-fashioning. Artists of varying ability and success understood that they transformed the abstractions of taste into tangible objects and images. They defined themselves in terms that qualified them for inclusion in the republic of taste.

      On the other hand, emissaries of taste were also makers and sellers of commodities. If artists had one foot in the republic of taste, the other was lodged squarely in the marketplace. They worked with their hands as well as their eyes in order to master the technical skills that could make taste visible. They made and sold paintings, portraits mainly. Artists, in other words, made and sold luxury goods. And the demand for luxury goods proved vulnerable to the slightest economic fluctuations. Operating in a sector of the economy that was unstable even by the standards of the day, aesthetic entrepreneurs had no choice but to sharpen their business skills and expand their markets. In the process, they and their patrons acquired new kinds of visibility within the early republic.

      Finding a Vocation