Europeans colonize North America in the early seventeenth century, motivated by religious and economic goals. Spain and France, the two Catholic powers in Europe, lead the way, establishing Santa Fe and Québec as their colonial capitals in North America, but Protestant England soon follows along with other European nations such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic. Tens of thousands of English migrants settle along the Atlantic seaboard of North America between 1607 and 1675; they occupy lands previously the territory of Native Americans in three major regions known today as New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Chesapeake. The English bring distinct traditions across the Atlantic with them, but their experience in the coastal colonies pushes them into new modes of social life and material culture.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, colonial elites emerge in the maturing colonies; plantation owners in the South and the colonial merchants in the North stand out as leading patrons of the arts. New
Georgian-style mansions are replete with
Rococo furniture forms. Immigrant
portraitists seek commissions. The British colonies experience enormous population growth: the mainland colonies have about 400,000 residents in 1720 and nearly 2 million by 1765. A population explosion in Europe brings new waves of white migrants while the continued
importation of enslaved Africans increases the number of blacks. An expanding engagement with the British empire brings British manufactured goods, fostering a new identity as Britons. Wealthy Americans travel back seeking the cultural milieu of England and the Continent. However, those attachments and the British desire to raise revenues to finance the operations of the empire generate a crisis in the political relationship between the mother country and the colonists, one that eventually ignites a war for independence.
After the American Revolution, a new federal government and federal culture emerge in the United States of America. An innovative arrangement of sharing power between the electorate, the states, and the national government is created with the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Despite the acclaimed selection of George Washington as the first president of the United States, political divisions remain between the northern and southern regions along with differing views of a strong central governmental authority. Political parties soon emerge over these conflicts, but other efforts focus on how to build a new nation. Patrons and artists also devise a distinctive nationalist culture around
Neoclassical principles, looking to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome for inspiration for their new republic.
George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument
The multiplicity of depictions of George Washington (1732–1799) testifies to his persistence in American life and myth. During his lifetime, his very image, whether presented as a Revolutionary War hero or as chief executive of the United States, exemplified the ideal leader: authoritative, victorious, strong, moral, and compassionate. Over the course of the nineteenth century, American and European popular culture elaborated on Washington’s iconic persona and adapted it to patriotic and sentimental purposes.
Two major bequests to the Metropolitan ensured that the collection would be rich in images of Washington in various media. In 1883, William Henry Huntington bequeathed more than 2,000 American portraits, primarily of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the marquis de Lafayette. For much of his life, Huntington was a Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune. An inveterate seeker of Americana at shops and flea markets, he purchased an array of medals, porcelains, textiles, and other works of art while abroad. The second gift to the Museum came in 1924 from Charles Allen Munn, editor and publisher of Scientific American for forty-three years. By the time of his death, Munn had assembled a notable collection of portraits of Washington. Among the highlights of his bequest are portraits by the American artists for whom Washington actually sat, including Gilbert Stuart (07.160), Charles Willson Peale (97.33), and John Trumbull (24.109.88).
General George Washington
A gentleman farmer from Virginia, Washington began his military career at the age of twenty, when he was commissioned as a major in the state’s militia; within three years, he had risen through the ranks to be appointed commander in chief of those troops. Twenty years later, in 1775, he was named commander in chief of the Continental Forces of North America, and he led his army to victory over Great Britain. He was admired for his ability to inspire and lead a disparate group of men into battle. After his retirement from service at the war’s end, he was venerated by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations of military men. Washington’s image in uniform, portrayed by so many artists in a variety of media, became a symbol not only of military prowess but also of national unity and American liberty.
President George Washington
During Washington’s two terms as president (1789–97), his image was modeled almost exclusively on portraits by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), the premier painter of the new nation. Stuart executed three different portraits from life sittings with the president, but it was the so-called Athenaeum portrait that became the most popular. Stuart himself painted at least seventy replicas of it, and, because it was exhibited in the Boston Athenaeum after Stuart’s death, many other artists were able to use it as the basis for their work. Stuart’s portrayal of Washington became so pervasive that, as the artist’s biographer, the critic William Dunlap, put it in 1832, “if George Washington should appear on earth, . . he would be treated as an impostor, when compared to Stuart’s likeness of him, unless he produced his credentials.”
The Myth of George Washington
The extraordinary outpouring of emotion after Washington’s death on December 14, 1799, reverberated worldwide, as mourners grieved not merely for the man himself but for the hero he had become and, still more warmly, for the father of the country. Washington’s role in American life had been of long duration and great depth. His image symbolized the power and legitimacy of the newly independent nation, which was still very much in the formative stages during the nineteenth century. His imposing figure as president embodied ideals of honesty, virtue, and patriotism (62.256.7). Nineteenth-century images of Washington ranged from his godlike apotheosis (52.585.66) to scenes of his personal life. His home, Mount Vernon, on the Potomac River in northern Virginia, became a shrine to his mythic celebrity. In 1853, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association was founded, mostly through the efforts of women, in order to save the historic property and honor Washington’s legacy.
George Washington and the American Centennials
In 1876, the United States observed the centennial of its founding, and 1889 marked the 100th anniversary of George Washington’s first inauguration as president. Nearing the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when Americans clamored for reassurance that their leaders were trustworthy and the country secure, both celebrations featured commemorative images of Washington—the epitome of an honorable head of state—in his varied roles as public servant and private individual.
In Philadelphia, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 featured new developments in art, design, and technology from an international group of exhibitors and attracted more than 8 million visitors. Washington’s portrait on plates (69.194.1), handkerchiefs (1985.347), glassware, and prints provided a nostalgic foil to burgeoning technological developments and made the country’s progress seem a natural continuum, from the American Revolution to the Industrial Revolution.
In 1889, grand celebrations were mounted in honor of the centennial of Washington’s inauguration. New York City officials erected a great arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue (in Washington Square), held a parade, launched a naval flotilla, and reenacted the swearing-in ceremony that had taken place in New York when it was briefly the nation’s capital. The Metropolitan Opera House hosted a gala ball and mounted an exhibition of Washington’s personal belongings and related memorabilia—pieces of history that established an authentic link to the country’s past and gave promise for the future.
Between the eve of the American Revolution and World War I, a group of modest British colonies became states; the frontier pushed westward to span the continent; a rural and agricultural society became urban and industrial; and the United States—reunified after the Civil War under an increasingly powerful federal government—emerged as a leading participant in world affairs. Throughout this complicated, transformative century and a half, American painters recorded everyday life as it changed around them, capturing the temperament of their respective eras, defining the character of people as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities.
At first, most painters embedded references to everyday life in portraits, which were the only works for which a market existed. Beginning about 1830, however, and largely in response to the development of public exhibition spaces in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, some painters were able to free themselves from dependence on portrait commissions and to adopt new subjects that would appeal to wider audiences. They worked primarily in the form of genre, a French term that means types or sorts and that in paintings refers to scenes of lower- and middle-class characters. William Sidney Mount, who led the way, and his contemporaries favored depictions of courtship, families, and community life in rural settings that were associated positively with fundamental national values. They reinforced in their works popular notions of American identity and competed with contemporaneous Hudson River School landscapists for attention and patronage. American genre painters produced works that were clearly delineated, humorous, and didactic or moralizing, like the old master Dutch or more recent French and English paintings and prints that inspired them.
By the 1850s, American painters of everyday life expanded their subject interests beyond the individual and the family to encompass a wider horizon, especially the nation’s politics and growing territory. The stage-set compositions they had enlisted in the previous decade, derived from European prototypes, gave way to more outdoor images that captured, literally, a wider view of American life. As population and wealth increased, there emerged a newly energetic and diversified art market that included auction houses, art lotteries, and fly-by-night dealers who set up sales shops in the cities. Artistic competition escalated exponentially and the profession opened to more artists, including women like Lilly Martin Spencer, who cast a critical eye on the domestic sphere from an insider’s perspective. Responding to pressure to come up with novel subjects that would distinguish their works at exhibition and attract purchasers, many American painters took on current, complex, and often difficult topics, including the relationships between blacks and whites, men and women, and immigrants and native workers. But they always enlisted euphemism or subtle ambiguity to portray these issues. A few artists explored themes from the rugged wilderness, which appealed to urban viewers seeking vicarious frontier or backwoods adventures.
The unique and overwhelming circumstances of the Civil War and the years of Reconstruction severely challenged American artists. The confluence of charged political and economic events, and profound social change, created such turmoil that many artists chose to examine only small, reassuring slices of the human experience, and to do so in subtle and open-ended accounts. Seeking to assuage the sorrow brought on by the war and to heal the nation’s fractured spirit in its wake, painters turned away from martial and political content. Responding to the assertion of women’s responsibilities after the loss of so many men in combat, artists depicted them in new roles and grappled with issues surrounding their new options. Expressing a longing for prewar innocence and the commemorative atmosphere associated with the nation’s Centennial, many painters portrayed children. And, as the agrarian basis of American life gave way to urbanization and industrialization, artists who lived, studied, worked, and exhibited their paintings in thriving cities looked to the countryside for their subjects. Painters of this era were, however, likely to show rural locales as temporary or nostalgic retreats from urban existence rather than sustainable habitats.
By the mid-1870s, the taste of American viewers and patrons changed in response to their expanded opportunities for travel; ready access to prints, photographs, illustrations in magazines and journals, and other reproductions; and exposure to art in newly founded museums. As these viewers and patrons, principally in the prosperous industrial Northeast, came to value contemporary Continental—especially French—art, American painters embraced an unprecedented internationalism. Easier transatlantic transportation and communication meant that more artists were able to study abroad, live in European cities and art colonies, and investigate a broad range of subjects and styles, from academic to Impressionist. They were as likely to paint people enjoying commonplace events in Paris or the French countryside as they were their subjects’ counterparts in New York or New England. Their works reveal an appreciation of the journalistic, fragmented, oblique narrative that characterized modern European examples and an evasion of the harsh realities of modern existence. By comparison with earlier genre scenes, these views of everyday life are ambiguous and, at times, completely elusive in their content. American painters also operated in an increasingly complex and professionalized art world, which enhanced their opportunities to display and market their works on both sides of the Atlantic. Often in competition with foreign rivals, they attended to the judgments of a newly serious and credible American art press.
Many late nineteenth-century American artists recorded the lives of women as devoted mothers, dedicated household managers, participants in genteel feminine rituals, and resolute keepers of culture. A few recounted the experiences of men at work and leisure and celebrated new American heroes. It is in this period that the cowboy emerges as an icon of American masculinity and of the receding frontier. As tension escalated between fading rural traditions and growing urbanization and industrialization, artists more often investigated city environs, including new sites for leisure, consumption, and entertainment. Beginning about 1900, the Ashcan painters advocated forthright portrayals of life in New York, but typically took a cheerful approach to increasing urban hardships. The Ashcan painters’ sometimes droll images, which they recorded as if “on the run” or from memory with broad, calligraphic forms, reflect the skills that most of them had cultivated as newspaper illustrators.