Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2005 by Wendell Garrett

Democratic nations ... will therefore cultivate the arts that serve to
render life easy in preference to those whose object is to adorn it.
They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will
require that the beautiful should be useful.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

In his address at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." In their enthusiasm, Americans were clamoring for an art of their own--an original, authentically American art that would demonstrate the success of American democracy in action. However, the world that American artists were born into was deeply provincial, and the development of a truly American artistic expression was more a gradual evolution than a passionate revolution.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The nineteenth-century Romantic belief that beauty and truth could be found in the commonplace led American artists to seek these ideals, as Emerson urged, in "the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat" and to explore "the near, the low, the common."

The essence of beauty for the sculptor Horatio Greenough invoked action and function, as embodied in the locomotive, the clipper ship, and a trotting horse pulling a wagon. William Sidney Mount stipulated: "I must paint such pictures as speak at once to the spectator, scenes that are most popular, that will be understood on the instant."

Jacksonian America was obsessed with itself and its people. As the discerning visitor Alexis de Tocqueville remarked: "It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it." A less controversial expression of this self-absorption was genre painting, which attempted to catch the appearance of people at revealing moments. It focused on an anecdote or incident that suggested a past and a future by freezing the present on canvas. It could be comic, tragic, melodramatic, sentimental, or simply picturesque. Genre painting was an excellent way of finding out how Americans looked on election day, at a militia muster, appearing in court, spearing eels, hunting bears, racing horses, or playing cards. "A painter's studio should be every where," said Mount, "wherever he finds a scene for a picture in doors or out--In the black smith's shop, the shoe maker's, the tailor's, the church, the tavern, or Hotel, the market, and into the dens of poverty and dis[s]ipation, high life and low life."

During that age the public recognized the artist's importance to society and granted him a correspondingly important place within it. This caused Greenough to truthfully say in 1852: "There is, at present, no country where the development and growth of an artist is more free, happy, and healthful than it is in the United States."