Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Wendell Garrett

Visited this afternoon the Metropolitan Museum of Art ... on West
Fourteenth Street.... Art treasures (so-called) are evidently
accumulating in New York, being picked up in Europe by our millionaires
and brought home. This collection promises very well, indeed. Twenty
years hence it will probably have grown into a really instructive
museum.
George Templeton Strong, Diary, June 3, 1873

In a spirit of snobbish annoyance Henry James, the fastidious expatriate, advised his readers that true art must wither in the "cruel air" of America. He was, of course, wrong. More than a century earlier the immigrant painter John Smibert had written his London agent that the future of the arts might well be in America. He was on the right track since painting has flourished here from colonial times to the present. The realism of our portrait painting has been called a reflection of the practical people who live here. The spaciousness of our landscape painting is right not only because of its topographical correctness, but also because our painters have not needed a sophisticated style to convey the boundlessness of the land. For generations our art has been the mirror of ourselves as a people.

Conditions in colonial America did not encourage rapid development of the fine arts. There were no patrons, no public art museums or private collections of consequence, and no art schools. However, a surprising number of first-rate artists did teach themselves painting, drawing, and sculpture. The first outstanding painters born in America, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, were essentially self-taught, and both emigrated to England, where they found fame.

After the War of 1812, faith in the future of the United States burned with evangelical fervor at every level. Ralph Waldo Emerson counseled in 1837, "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves." Painters took up the cry to the extent that Mrs. Anna Jameson, visiting from England in the 1830s, proclaimed, "the country seemed to swarm with painters." Artists of the period by and large shared a common vision with the society around them and worked from an intuitive and natural relationship with their audience.

The Civil War shattered this cultural unity and shifted the attention of rich Americans to Europe as a source of paintings and other artworks to fill their mansions and, soon, the museums. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston were incorporated in 1870, and booty from around the world found its way into their galleries.

American art students also flocked to Europe for instruction and came back with a sense of perspective. As William Dean Howells wrote: "The American who has known Europe much can never again see his country with the single eye of his ante-European days." Henry James was joined by John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt, the extraordinary young Philadelphian who overrode her rich parents' objections and went to Paris to study art.

James himself returned to the United States in 1904 after a twenty-one-year absence. He visited his brother William in New Hampshire, traveled to Florida and to California, and found the country vastly changed. Everywhere he found evidence of a new vulgarity and corrupt power, and he questioned whether the old American virtues of moral purity, innocence of spirit, and freshness of vision could be retained amidst the vast social and material changes taking place. Could the United States shake off its provincialism and develop a true civilization worthy of its European heritage? He did not answer this question.

Wendell Garrett