Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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disputed the “generally adopted opinion” that “Ginius for the fine arts, is a particular gift, and not an acquirement. That Poets, Painters, &c are born such.” A decade later, in 1834, the painter-turned-art-historian William Dunlap poked fun at apocryphal stories about the painter whose genius drove him to “scrawl, scratch, pencil, or paint as soon as he could hold anything wherewith he could make a mark.”5 From the artists’ perspective, the problem with these hoary celebrations of genius was the way they ignored both the contingency that led to a career in the arts and the laborious training necessary to produce proficiency. Greatness, as Peale and Dunlap well knew, was not foreordained. From the historian’s perspective, the problem with these narratives is that they work backward. Beginning with the polished work of a master painter, they seek evidence for its origins in the artist’s biography. The clichéd stories derided by Peale and Dunlap are premised on the distance that separates canonical painters at the apex of their careers from the ranks of mere practitioners. That seemingly insurmountable gulf is then projected back in time, to the moment when training began, when “giniuses” and practitioners alike were novices. Reversing this perspective (and setting aside questions about a painter’s eventual greatness) affords a far clearer understanding of the cultural and economic environments that enabled men like Peale, Dunlap, or Greenwood to forge careers as aesthetic entrepreneurs.
Painting was not an obvious vocation in the early republic. Academies and seminaries may have valorized taste and pushed male and female students to develop an eye for art, but they stopped well short of encouraging them to make a living by it. Men from the middling and upper classes found that the decision to make a living by painting, much like the decision to make a living by writing, was potentially suspect. The choice was well outside the conventions of masculine respectability. Landed wealth, commerce, the learned professions: These were the respectable ways for men to acquire and maintain property; the property thus accumulated was meant to culminate in disinterested civic service (in the eighteenth-century imagination) and partisan political engagement (in the nineteenth-century imagination). The arts, in contrast, were suitable for leisured contemplation and criticism or, at most, for dabbling. This ideal was hardly an easy fit for men whose talents and inclinations drew them toward careers in the arts.6
If painting was not a secure source of masculine identity, neither was it a secure form of financial support, as the fathers of many aspiring painters pointed out. Indeed, accounts of early national painters’ lives echo with anecdotes about young men from propertied families who turned to art despite the objections raised by their fathers. In his 1841 autobiography, John Trumbull recalled his father’s persistent attempts to push him into the law, widely heralded as “the profession which in a republic leads to all emolument and distinction.” Dismissing his son’s fantasies about the “honors paid to artists in the glorious days of Greece and Athens,” the former governor drily observed that “Connecticut is not Athens.”7 Indeed, the decision to paint is regularly depicted as a rebellion against patriarchal authority in History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), William Dunlap’s monumental survey of the careers of American artists. Henry Sargent’s “irresistible” desire to paint “deranged or interrupted the sober avocations of mercantile life” that his father, an eminent merchant, had planned for him. Thomas Sully’s father, a theater manager, initially placed him with an insurance broker who returned the boy in short order, complaining that although he “was very industrious in multiplying figures, they were figures of men and women.” Only then could Sully persuade his father to apprentice him to a French portrait painter. Lawyer-turned-miniaturist Charles Fraser, orphaned at the age of nine, desperately wanted to pursue a career as an artist. But his guardians “did not yield to his desire for instruction in that art,” Dunlap wrote, speculating that they feared committing the boy to a future some “might deem less certain” than the learned professions.
Such concerns were not limited to families that might reasonably expect to situate their sons as merchants or lawyers. Even Joseph Wood’s father, who was merely a “respectable farmer” from Orange County, New York, expected the boy to follow in his footsteps.8 Aspiring painters whose fathers were artisans or farmers not yet touched by the Village Enlightenment could also encounter the disapproval of older generations. Chester Harding, for one, recalled that his grandfather dismissed his career in terms that cast aspersions on both his honor and his manhood: The old man regarded it as “very little better than swindling to charge forty dollars for one of those effigies” and insisted that he “settle down on a farm, and become a respectable man.”9
The decision to paint professionally was, of course, least likely for women. Those who attended academies might have discovered aptitudes for drawing and painting, but they were not supposed to find careers. On the contrary. Paid work was supposed to find them, and then only in emergencies, occasioned by, say, the death of a father or the financial reverses of a husband. Not surprisingly, the extant letters and diaries written by female artists and the biographies written about them during the nineteenth century have nothing to say about how, or even whether, they consciously chose to commence their careers. Particular women may have experienced an awakening of ambition and a hunger for distinction. Yet in their personal writing and in the few accounts written about them, their initial aspirations are either subsumed within household strategies or presented as fait accompli.10
There was thus no single path to this unconventional vocation. Family connections surely steered some women and men toward careers as painters. Charles Willson Peale famously named a number of his children after eminent artists and did everything in his power to push them into the family business. So, too, did Cephas Thompson, a self-taught portrait painter from Massachusetts, whose children Cephas Giovanni Thompson and Marietta Angelica Thompson supported themselves as artists. Kin could serve as examples, teachers, and partners. Family connections may have been especially helpful for female artists, whose access to training, travel, and patronage was markedly constrained.11 Academies, which provided students with a stylistic vocabulary along with at least rudimentary training in drawing, could also serve as a bridge to a career in art. Even a college education seems to have provided a small handful of very privileged young men with the opportunity to enhance their training. Although John Trumbull’s father sent him to Harvard in hopes of squelching his artistic ambitions, the teenager seized the opportunity to scour the college library for engraved prints and treatises on painting and perspective; Samuel F. B. Morse began painting in earnest while he was studying at Yale.12
The trades provided a far larger number of men with the skills necessary to take up painting. Ezra Ames, for example, painted coaches in Albany before he painted likenesses of the state’s legislators. Chair making and sign painting provided an initial entrée to painting for Chester Harding, who eventually attained both fame and wealth, and his brother Horace, who did not.13 Many of the men who became portrait painters moved back and forth between art and artisanship as business dictated. Every city boasted tradesmen-turned-painters “who would occasionally work at any thing,” sniffed John Wesley Jarvis, who had the good fortune to launch his career with an apprenticeship in Edward Savage’s studio.14
Serendipity played no small role in the choices of many. Men who suffered from chronic ill health, like Joseph Steward and Eliab Metcalf, turned to art only after deciding that it was a profession suited to those with “impaired health and debilitated frame[s].”15 John Vanderlyn began to discover his vocation as a consequence of clerking for Thomas Barrow, New York City’s “only dealer in good prints.” Henry Inman’s “early delights were concerned with pictures,” but his aspirations took flight when he read Madame de Genlis’s Tales of the Castle, a children’s anthology that included biographical sketches of famous painters and sculptors.16 A chance encounter with a children’s book, a lucky clerkship, a bout of poor health: These random circumstances were as likely to steer a person toward a career in art as an analogous apprenticeship or formal education.
Learning to Paint
However one acquired the desire to paint, obtaining the requisite training was notoriously difficult.17 Anglo-American artists worked at a remove from the protocols that dominated European and especially English painting, and had—at best—limited access to formal studio training.