Читать книгу American Men of Mind - Burton Egbert Stevenson - Страница 13

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If background and tradition are needed for literature, they are even more needed for art, and it is curiously worth noting that the background and traditions of England did not serve for her child across the sea. In both literature and art, so far as vital and significant achievement is concerned, the young nation had to find itself, and, starting from a rude and rough beginning, work its way upward of its own strength. Perhaps in no other way may the youth of America be so completely realized as by the thought that all of real importance in both literature and art which she can boast has been produced within the past ninety years—little more than the three score years and ten which the Psalmist assigned as the span of a single life.

We do not mean to say that European influence is not plainly to be traced in both our art and literature. There is a family resemblance, so to speak, as between a child and its parents, and yet the child has an individuality of its own. In literature, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman are distinctively American; and, as we shall find, so are our masters of painting and sculpture.

American art begins with John Singleton Copley. There had been daubers before him, as there were after, but Copley was the first man born in America who produced paintings which the world still contemplates with pleasure. Copley was born in Boston in 1737, his father dying shortly afterwards, and his mother supporting herself by keeping a tobacco shop. About 1746 she married again, most fortunately for her son, for her second husband was Peter Pelham, a mezzotint engraver of considerable merit, who gave the boy lessons in drawing. He proved an apt and precocious pupil, and by the time he had reached seventeen had executed a number of portraits.

His reputation steadily increased, and his income from his work was so satisfactory that he hesitated to try his fortunes in the larger field of London. Finally, in 1774, he sailed for England, and in the next year sent for his family to join him there. The opening of the Revolution persuaded him to stay in England, as there would be no demand for his work in America in so tumultuous a time. In London his talents brought him ample patronage, his income enabled him to live the stately and dignified life he loved, so that, when the Revolution ended, there seemed no reason why he should abandon it for the crudities of Boston. He therefore continued in London until the end of his life, which came in 1815.

Copley was a laborious and painstaking craftsman, setting down what he saw upon canvas with uncompromising sincerity. He worked very slowly and many stories are told of how he tried the patience of his sitters. The result was a series of portraits which preserve the very spirit of the age—serious, self-reliant and capable, pompous and lacking humor. His later work has an atmosphere and repose which his early work lacks, but it is less important to America. His early portraits, which hang on the walls of so many Boston homes, and which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the titles of nobility of the old Boston families, are priceless documents of history.

Copley was an artist from choice rather than necessity; he followed painting because it assured him a good livelihood, and he was a patient and painstaking craftsman. His life was serene and happy; he was without the tribulations, as he seems to have been without the enthusiasms of the great artist. Not so with his most famous contemporary, Benjamin West, whose life was filled to overflowing with the contrast and picturesqueness which Copley's lacked.

West was born in 1738 at a little Pennsylvania frontier settlement. His parents were Quakers, and to the rigor and simplicity of frontier life were added those of that sect. But even these handicaps could not turn the boy aside from his vocation, for he was a born painter, if there ever was one. At the age of six he tried to draw, with red and black ink, a likeness of a baby he had been set to watch; a year later, a party of friendly Indians, amused by some sketches of birds and leaves he showed them, taught him how to prepare the red and yellow colors which they used on their ornaments. His mother furnished some indigo, brushes were secured by clipping the family cat—no doubt greatly to its disgust—and with these crude materials he set to work.

His success won him the present of a box of paints from a relative in Philadelphia. With that treasure the boy lived and slept, and his mother, finally discovering that he was running away from school, found him in the garret with a picture before him which she refused to let him finish lest he should spoil it. That painting was preserved to be exhibited sixty-six years later.

The boy's talent was so evident, and his determination to be a painter so fixed, that his parents finally overcame their scruples against an occupation which they considered vain and useless, and sent him to Philadelphia. There he lived as frugally as possible, saving his money for a trip to Italy, and finally, at the age of twenty-two, set sail for Europe.

His success there was immediate. He gained friends in the most influential circles, spent three years in study in Italy, and going to London in 1764, received so many commissions that he decided to live there permanently. He wrote home for his father to join him, and to bring with him a Miss Shewell, to whom West was betrothed. He also wrote to the young lady, stating that his father would sail at a certain time, and asking her to join him. The letter fell into the hands of Miss Shewell's brother, who objected to West for some reason, and who promptly locked the girl in her room. Three friends of West's concluded that this outrage upon true love was not to be endured, smuggled a rope-ladder to her, and got her out of the house and safely on board the vessel. These three friends were Benjamin Franklin, Francis Hopkinson and William White, the latter the first Bishop of the American Episcopal Church, and the exploit was one which they were always proud to remember. Miss Shewell reached London safely and the lovers were happily married.

Meanwhile West's success had been given a sudden impetus by his introduction to King George III. The two men became lifelong friends, and the King gave him commission after commission, culminating in a command to decorate the Royal Chapel at Windsor. His first reverse came when the King's mind began to fail. His commissions were cancelled and his pensions stopped. He was deposed from the Presidency of the Royal Academy, which he had founded, and was for a time in needy circumstances; but the tide soon turned, and his last years were marked by the production of a number of great paintings. He died at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral with splendid ceremonies. So ended one of the most remarkable careers in history.

West was, perhaps, more notable as a man than as an artist, for his fame as a painter has steadily declined. His greatest service to art was the example he set of painting historical groups in the costume of the period instead of in the vestments of the early Romans, as had been the custom. This innovation was made by him in his picture of the death of General Wolfe, and created no little disturbance. His friends, including Reynolds, protested against such a desecration of tradition; even the King questioned him, and West replied that the painter should be bound by truth as well as the historian, and to represent a group of English soldiers in the year 1758 as dressed in classic costume was absurd. After the picture was completed, Reynolds was the first to declare that West had won, and that his picture would occasion a revolution in art—as, indeed, it did.

It is difficult to understand the habit of thought which insisted on clothing great men in garments they could never by any possibility have worn, yet it persisted until a comparatively late day. The most famous example in this country is Greenough's statue of Washington, just outside the Capitol. One looks at it with a certain sense of shock, for the Father of His Country is sitting half-naked, in a great arm chair, with some drapery over his legs, and a fold hanging over one shoulder. We shall have occasion in the next chapter to speak of it and of its maker.

Another of West's services to art was the wholehearted way in which he extended a helping hand to any who needed it. He was always willing to give such instruction as he could, and among his pupils were at least four men who added not a little to American art—Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and Thomas Sully.

Peale was born in Maryland in 1741, and was, among other things, a saddler, a coach-maker, a clock-maker and a silversmith. He finally decided to add painting to his other accomplishments, so he secured some painting materials and a book of instructions and set to work. In 1770, a number of gentlemen of Annapolis furnished him with enough money to go to England, a loan which he promised to repay with pictures upon his return. West received him kindly, and when Peale's money gave out, as it soon did, welcomed him into his own house. Peale remained in London for four years, returning to America in time to join Washington as a captain of volunteers, and to take part in the battles of Trenton and Germantown.

After the war he continued painting, but, in 1801, his mind, always alert for new experiences, was led away in a strange direction. The bones of a mammoth were discovered in Ulster County, New York, and Peale secured possession of them, had them taken to Philadelphia, and started a museum. It rapidly increased in size, for all sorts of curiosities poured in upon him, and he began a series of lectures on natural history, which, whether learned or not, proved so interesting that large and distinguished audiences gathered to hear him. In 1805, he founded the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest and most flourishing institution of the kind in the country. He lived to a hale old age, never having known sickness, and dying as the result of incautious exposure. Like West, his life is more interesting than his work, for while he painted fairly good portraits, they were the work rather of a skilled craftsman than of an artist.