Republic of Taste
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Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic. Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship. Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
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Republic of Taste
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This emphasis, which amounted to a rhetorical dematerialization of the practice of painting, served to locate artists’ work in the realm of the “liberal” rather than the “mechanical” arts. It recapitulated the venerable, transatlantic hierarchies that were rooted in writings by the Earl of Shaftesbury, popularized in any number of encyclopedias and treatises on art, reinforced in belles lettres, and painstakingly copied into the commonplace books of academy students. As one authority, writing for an American encyclopedia, put it, the “noble” and “ingenious” liberal arts (which included painting, poetry, and music) depend more on the “labour of the mind that on that of the hand.” The “mechanical arts” (which included the “trades and manufactures” like weaving, clock making, carpentry, and printing) depended on “the hand and body” more than the mind. Or, in the words of Connecticut miniaturist Betsey Way Champlain, “Bright Fancy guides the pencil while I draw,/Who spurns at mechanisms servile law.”31
Such easy dismissals of the merely mechanical offered a distorted representation of the lived experience of the majority of American painters, who struggled to acquire even basic technique. So, too, the hard and fast distinctions between the work of the eye and the work of the hand, for there was no denying that, on a fundamental level, painting was a manual art that owed much to the delicacy and dexterity of an artist’s hand as it moved a brush over a piece of canvas or ivory. Yet the dematerialization of the practice of painting was a useful gambit precisely because it reinforced artists’ claims to membership in the republic of taste. Small wonder, then, that it appeared so regularly in artists’ textual self-representations. The selves fashioned by painters like Greenwood, Dunlap, and Harding gained (or squandered) cultural and financial capital with their eyes rather than their hands.
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