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CHAPTER TWO

Aesthetic Entrepreneurs

In the spring of 1806, Ethan Allen Greenwood traveled from New York City to Hanover, New Hampshire, for his final term at Dartmouth College. Like so many of his peers, Greenwood’s years at college had been interrupted by stints teaching at regional academies in order to earn money for his own education. And like so many of his ambitious peers, he anticipated a career in law. But Greenwood was also an aspiring painter and a voracious consumer of culture, and culture was the purpose of the winter he had just spent in New York. While he was in the city, he read a “great deal.” He frequented the theater, where he saw Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, School for Scandal, and a production of Hamlet starring Thomas Apthorpe Cooper, one of the most acclaimed actors on the American stage. He went to see the nation’s largest pipe organ before it was shipped to a church in Philadelphia. He attended a variety of churches and visited the New York Academy of the Fine Arts. But mostly Ethan Allen Greenwood painted. He had arranged to study with the celebrated artist Edward Savage, best known now for the painting The Washington Family. Strapped for cash, Greenwood offset the cost of his training by offering drawing and painting lessons to Savage’s daughters. By the end of his tenure with Savage, he had painted copies of ten portraits “among which was Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, head of Washington, & [Gilbert] Stuarts full length of Washington, Cleopatra & others” in addition to “painting my own likeness.”

Back in New Hampshire, Greenwood determined to make a name for himself by turning the fruits of his New York stay into an exhibition. He displayed the portraits he had painted alongside the prints he had purchased in his college rooms and invited all of Dartmouth to admire his accomplishments. To Greenwood’s delight, “the government of [the] college, their families, & some other ladies called … to see my pictures” and several of the “ladies” stayed on to have their profiles taken. That April day, the college student became newly visible to Hanover’s better sort. But he also became visible in new ways—as a painter who could render a likeness, as a connoisseur whose taste could compel and instruct, and as a painted face, as the object of others’ discerning looks.¹ The memory of that heady afternoon may well have stuck in Greenwood’s mind, for by 1813 he was ready to turn his back on the law and declare that his “attention now will be given strictly to painting.” He spent the following five years painting hundreds of portraits; purchasing prints, books, and statuary at auctions; and looking—at art, at curiosities, at entertainments. In 1818, he bought the contents of Edward Savage’s museum in order to form the core of his New England Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened its doors in Boston on July 4.² Launching a career as a museum proprietor at the age of thirty-nine, Ethan Allen Greenwood had finally realized the promise of his college exhibition.

To a large extent, the American republic of taste depended on the efforts of individuals like Greenwood. As producers and impresarios, proprietors and teachers, their unlikely careers contributed much to the efflorescence of aesthetic objects and experiences following the Revolution. They catered to the needs and desires of men and women whose appetites for taste had been whetted by an academy stint. Perhaps more important, they helped extend that appetite to people whose fortunes or life courses ruled out the kind of formal aesthetic education promoted within academies. Their success depended on their ability to surmount a series of challenges and hone a battery of seemingly unrelated skills.³

Ethan Allen Greenwood offers a case in point. Before he could begin to imagine a vocation in the arts, he had to acquire a painter’s technical, manual skills. In addition to training his hands, he needed to train his eye, to cultivate an intuitive appreciation for the beautiful, the curious, the instructive. He needed to know, immediately, what kinds of images and objects would appeal to his patrons’ tastes. He also needed to convince them that he was as good with his eyes as he was with his brush: As a portrait painter, he needed to be able to seize on the traits that would render sitters’ character visible on canvas; as a museum owner, he was responsible for curating the exhibits that would entertain visitors’ eyes. Skill and taste, however, were not sufficient. Turning portraits and exhibits into cash required both the careful management of existing markets and cultivation of new ones. Success as a portrait painter and museum keeper demanded that Ethan Allen Greenwood become an aesthetic entrepreneur.

To describe Greenwood and his peers as aesthetic entrepreneurs is to capture the dual elements of their careers, to situate their lives in the history of looking as well as in the history of laboring and commerce.⁴ On the one hand, Greenwood was simultaneously a product of the period’s deep preoccupation with taste and a promoter of its rich visual culture. His career as a portrait painter and museum proprietor was made possible by a society that had embraced the sort of aesthetic precepts promoted by academies and seminaries. He found his clientele among a generation of women and men who were adamant about the cultural and political importance of taste, even if they were sometimes vague on its qualifying characteristics. Greenwood’s patrons literally looked for new objects and spectacles upon which to exercise their taste just as they looked to print culture and educational institutions to legitimate it. Indeed, it was precisely this growing market for taste, manifested in multiple forms, that enabled many men (and more than a few women) to seek out careers as painters, art teachers, museum proprietors, or critics. This preoccupation with taste and visuality did more than expand consumer markets and open up employment opportunities. It also stood at the center of artists’ self-fashioning. Artists of varying ability and success understood that they transformed the abstractions of taste into tangible objects and images. They defined themselves in terms that qualified them for inclusion in the republic of taste.

On the other hand, emissaries of taste were also makers and sellers of commodities. If artists had one foot in the republic of taste, the other was lodged squarely in the marketplace. They worked with their hands as well as their eyes in order to master the technical skills that could make taste visible. They made and sold paintings, portraits mainly. Artists, in other words, made and sold luxury goods. And the demand for luxury goods proved vulnerable to the slightest economic fluctuations. Operating in a sector of the economy that was unstable even by the standards of the day, aesthetic entrepreneurs had no choice but to sharpen their business skills and expand their markets. In the process, they and their patrons acquired new kinds of visibility within the early republic.

Finding a Vocation

Near the end of his long and remarkable career, Charles Willson Peale disputed the “generally adopted opinion” that “Ginius for the fine arts, is a particular gift, and not an acquirement. That Poets, Painters, &c are born such.” A decade later, in 1834, the painter-turned-art-historian William Dunlap poked fun at apocryphal stories about the painter whose genius drove him to “scrawl, scratch, pencil, or paint as soon as he could hold anything wherewith he could make a mark.”⁵ From the artists’ perspective, the problem with these hoary celebrations of genius was the way they ignored both the contingency that led to a career in the arts and the laborious training necessary to produce proficiency. Greatness, as Peale and Dunlap well knew, was not foreordained. From the historian’s perspective, the problem with these narratives is that they work backward. Beginning with the polished work of a master painter, they seek evidence for its origins in the artist’s biography. The clichéd stories derided by Peale and Dunlap are premised on the distance that separates canonical painters at the apex of their careers from the ranks of mere practitioners. That seemingly insurmountable gulf is then projected back in time, to the moment when training began, when “giniuses” and practitioners alike were novices. Reversing this perspective (and setting aside questions about a painter’s eventual greatness) affords a far clearer understanding of the cultural and economic environments that enabled men like Peale, Dunlap, or Greenwood to forge careers as aesthetic entrepreneurs.

Painting was not an obvious vocation in the early republic. Academies and seminaries may have valorized taste and pushed male and female students to develop an eye for art, but they stopped well short of encouraging them to make a living by it. Men from the middling and upper classes found that the decision to make a living by painting, much like the decision to make a living by writing, was potentially suspect. The choice was well outside the conventions of masculine respectability. Landed wealth, commerce, the learned professions: These were the respectable ways for men to acquire and maintain property; the property thus accumulated was meant to culminate in disinterested civic service (in the eighteenth-century imagination) and partisan political engagement (in the nineteenth-century imagination). The arts, in contrast, were suitable for leisured contemplation and criticism or, at most, for dabbling. This ideal was hardly an easy fit for men whose talents and inclinations drew them toward careers in the arts.⁶

If painting was not a secure source of masculine identity, neither was it a secure form of financial support, as the fathers of many aspiring painters pointed out. Indeed, accounts of early national painters’ lives echo with anecdotes about young men from propertied families who turned to art despite the objections raised by their fathers. In his 1841 autobiography, John Trumbull recalled his father’s persistent attempts to push him into the law, widely heralded as “the profession which in a republic leads to all emolument and distinction.” Dismissing his son’s fantasies about the “honors paid to artists in the glorious days of Greece and Athens,” the former governor drily observed that “Connecticut is not Athens.”⁷ Indeed, the decision to paint is regularly depicted as a rebellion against patriarchal authority in History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), William Dunlap’s monumental survey of the careers of American artists. Henry Sargent’s “irresistible” desire to paint “deranged or interrupted the sober avocations of mercantile life” that his father, an eminent merchant, had planned for him. Thomas Sully’s father, a theater manager, initially placed him with an insurance broker who returned the boy in short order, complaining that although he “was very industrious in multiplying figures, they were figures of men and women.” Only then could Sully persuade his father to apprentice him to a French portrait painter. Lawyer-turned-miniaturist Charles Fraser, orphaned at the age of nine, desperately wanted to pursue a career as an artist. But his guardians “did not yield to his desire for instruction in that art,” Dunlap wrote, speculating that they feared committing the boy to a future some “might deem less certain” than the learned professions.

Such concerns were not limited to families that might reasonably expect to situate their sons as merchants or lawyers. Even Joseph Wood’s father, who was merely a “respectable farmer” from Orange County, New York, expected the boy to follow in his footsteps.⁸ Aspiring painters whose fathers were artisans or farmers not yet touched by the Village Enlightenment could also encounter the disapproval of older generations. Chester Harding, for one, recalled that his grandfather dismissed his career in terms that cast aspersions on both his honor and his manhood: The old man regarded it as “very little better than swindling to charge forty dollars for one of those effigies” and insisted that he “settle down on a farm, and become a respectable man.”⁹

The decision to paint professionally was, of course, least likely for women. Those who attended academies might have discovered aptitudes for drawing and painting, but they were not supposed to find careers. On the contrary. Paid work was supposed to find them, and then only in emergencies, occasioned by, say, the death of a father or the financial reverses of a husband. Not surprisingly, the extant letters and diaries written by female artists and the biographies written about them during the nineteenth century have nothing to say about how, or even whether, they consciously chose to commence their careers. Particular women may have experienced an awakening of ambition and a hunger for distinction. Yet in their personal writing and in the few accounts written about them, their initial aspirations are either subsumed within household strategies or presented as fait accompli.¹⁰

There was thus no single path to this unconventional vocation. Family connections surely steered some women and men toward careers as painters. Charles Willson Peale famously named a number of his children after eminent artists and did everything in his power to push them into the family business. So, too, did Cephas Thompson, a self-taught portrait painter from Massachusetts, whose children Cephas Giovanni Thompson and Marietta Angelica Thompson supported themselves as artists. Kin could serve as examples, teachers, and partners. Family connections may have been especially helpful for female artists, whose access to training, travel, and patronage was markedly constrained.¹¹ Academies, which provided students with a stylistic vocabulary along with at least rudimentary training in drawing, could also serve as a bridge to a career in art. Even a college education seems to have provided a small handful of very privileged young men with the opportunity to enhance their training. Although John Trumbull’s father sent him to Harvard in hopes of squelching his artistic ambitions, the teenager seized the opportunity to scour the college library for engraved prints and treatises on painting and perspective; Samuel F. B. Morse began painting in earnest while he was studying at Yale.¹²

The trades provided a far larger number of men with the skills necessary to take up painting. Ezra Ames, for example, painted coaches in Albany before he painted likenesses of the state’s legislators. Chair making and sign painting provided an initial entrée to painting for Chester Harding, who eventually attained both fame and wealth, and his brother Horace, who did not.¹³ Many of the men who became portrait painters moved back and forth between art and artisanship as business dictated. Every city boasted tradesmen-turned-painters “who would occasionally work at any thing,” sniffed John Wesley Jarvis, who had the good fortune to launch his career with an apprenticeship in Edward Savage’s studio.¹⁴

Serendipity played no small role in the choices of many. Men who suffered from chronic ill health, like Joseph Steward and Eliab Metcalf, turned to art only after deciding that it was a profession suited to those with “impaired health and debilitated frame[s].”¹⁵ John Vanderlyn began to discover his vocation as a consequence of clerking for Thomas Barrow, New York City’s “only dealer in good prints.” Henry Inman’s “early delights were concerned with pictures,” but his aspirations took flight when he read Madame de Genlis’s Tales of the Castle, a children’s anthology that included biographical sketches of famous painters and sculptors.¹⁶ A chance encounter with a children’s book, a lucky clerkship, a bout of poor health: These random circumstances were as likely to steer a person toward a career in art as an analogous apprenticeship or formal education.

Learning to Paint

However one acquired the desire to paint, obtaining the requisite training was notoriously difficult.¹⁷ Anglo-American artists worked at a remove from the protocols that dominated European and especially English painting, and had—at best—limited access to formal studio training. Would-be American artists had to do more than learn to paint. They also had to invent that training that would teach them to do so. When Maryland saddler Charles Willson Peale decided to try his hand at painting in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, he quickly realized that “he had seen very few paintings of any kind, and as to the preparations and methods of using colours, he was totally ignorant of them.” Although he could jerry-rig a palette and easel at home, he had to travel to Philadelphia for paint. When he arrived at the “colour shop,” he realized that he was “at a loss to know what to purchase, for he only knew the names of such colours, as are most commonly known.” Ever resourceful, Peale went straight to James Rivington’s bookstore, where he picked up a copy of Robert Dossie’s Handmaid to the Arts. After four days of study, he returned to the shop prepared to purchase the paints with which to launch his new career. For the next several years, he simultaneously painted portraits up and down the Atlantic seaboard and immersed himself in the work produced and collected by men like John Hesselius, John Singleton Copley, and John Smibert. By 1767, he had progressed enough that some of his Maryland patrons raised the money to send him to London for “close study” with Benjamin West, by then the director of the Society of Artists. When he returned to Maryland two years later, Peale had acquired skills in oil and watercolor painting, sculpture, and mezzotint engraving; he had mastered full-length portraits and ivory miniatures.¹⁸

An aspiring artist in the early republic would have faced challenges not much different than the ones Peale overcame a half-century earlier. Indeed, one rationale for establishing early national art academies like the Columbianum (1794), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805), and the New York Academy of the Fine Arts, later renamed the American Academy of the Fine Arts (1802), was to provide young artists with the sort of streamlined, systematic training that Peale, Dunlap, Trumbull, and others had enjoyed in London, courtesy of Benjamin West and the Royal Academy. Yet American artists never succeeded in establishing such an institution, not least because they disagreed bitterly about whether and how an academy modeled after a hierarchical organization tied to a royal court could meet the needs of a republic. As a consequence, through the first decades of the nineteenth century, men and women who wanted to learn to paint well enough to live by their brushes pursued strategies that recalled Peale’s haphazard early training.

Learning to draw was only the beginning. Color posed daunting challenges. Before ready-ground pigments first became available in the 1830s, artists had to mix their own paints. Coming up with “receipts” that delivered consistent, long-lasting color in a form that was easy to work with was an ongoing concern, even for painters like Copley, Peale, and Washington Allston, who had considerable technical skills.¹⁹ Then there was the question of application: How could painters learn to combine multiple colors—to say nothing of underpainting, toning, varnishing, and glazing—in order to reproduce what they saw in the world around them, much less the stylistic conventions of other paintings? Painters snatched up studio training when and where they could. But the kind of sustained study that Greenwood enjoyed with Savage during the winter of 1806 was elusive. Established painters were not always interested in taking students. Gilbert Stuart, for one, was willing to dispense snippets of advice to a long list of early national painters, but he extended formal studio training to a very select few. Painters like Savage and his pupil John Wesley Jarvis, who were willing to offer systematic training, were only accessible in eastern cities.²⁰ In the absence of formal training, loose-knit networks of like-minded individuals provided one avenue for sharing technical information. Most of these exchanges unfolded in informal, catch-as-catch-can conversations, but some took the form of correspondence. The canonical John Singleton Copley and the obscure Mary Way, for example, both wrote letters to their painter siblings in which they detailed long bouts of trial and error at the easel and suggested solutions to technical problems ranging from manufacturing paint to lighting a sitter.²¹

Even artists with considerable formal training found that the acquisition of basic technique could be a lifelong process. Dunlap, who trained with West, supported himself more or less successfully as a miniaturist for months in western New York and Boston despite being ignorant “even in the knowledge necessary to prepare ivory for the reception of color.” The deficiency was only corrected when Edward Malbone learned about Dunlap’s methods while the two were chatting at a dinner party. Malbone took pity and, reeling from a champagne hangover the next morning, walked Dunlap through the process.²²

However a painter acquired discrete skills, he or she needed to incorporate them into a finished picture that conformed to established standards and conventions. Thus, painters sought out opportunities to copy paintings by Old Masters and American masters. These paintings, which were usually copies of copies, grounded practice in emulation. When actual paintings were out of reach, artists looked to engraved prints as guides for composition and templates for future work. Thus Dunlap and Sargent spent hours as teenagers copying mezzotints of Copley’s renowned “shark painting.”²³

If ambition, finances, and luck aligned, an American artist’s training culminated on the other side of the Atlantic. London was the most common destination, not least because of Benjamin West, who helped train three generations of American painters. But occasionally Americans like John Vanderlyn made their way as far as Italy or France. Access to European training obviously varied greatly. For Dunlap, blessed with an indulgent father who was a successful merchant, or Trumbull, possessed of impeccable social and political connections, European training was relatively easy to acquire. But it was not beyond the reach of the self-taught Harding, whose impoverished father had been more interested in devising a perpetual motion machine than in procuring “bread and butter” for “his hungry children.” To be sure, Harding had to postpone the trip until he had saved enough to support his family and himself while he was abroad; he sailed for England as a means of enhancing an already successful career, not launching one. Nevertheless, shortly after he turned thirty, Harding, a former chair maker and sign painter, walked into Britain’s Royal Academy to view one of Raphael’s original cartoons.²⁴

Predictably, women had a far more difficult time making their way through every step of this fragmented trajectory. The most privileged and talented were stymied in their attempts to advance beyond the skills taught at academies and seminaries. When the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced its first annual exhibition in 1810, President Francis Hopkinson grandly invited women to participate. “I hope and trust the walls of our academy will soon be decorated with products of female genius; and that no means will be omitted to invite and encourage them,” he told the academy’s board of directors. Despite the Pennsylvania Academy’s endorsement of “female genius,” only three of the hundreds of pieces included in the exhibition were produced by women. Two of those women were members of the extended Peale family.²⁵

Training, rather than genius, was to blame. The proficiency required of an academy-approved artist was simply beyond the reach of most female painters. Formal studio training with an established artist was all but impossible for a woman to obtain, unless—like Anna Claypoole Peale, Maria Peale, Rosalie Sully, or Marietta Angelica Thompson—she could receive it from a male relative. Instead, aspiring female painters fell back on lessons from itinerant teachers. Miniaturist Sarah Goodridge, for example, who became successful in the 1830s, benefited from Gilbert Stuart’s criticism and encouragement, but she received her extremely limited formal training from an unknown painter from Hartford, Connecticut, who briefly offered lessons in Boston. European study was out of the question for women. Consider Anne Hall, the daughter of a “physician of eminence” who enthusiastically encouraged her talent, albeit within the parameters dictated by gender conventions. Hall’s father made sure that she had top-notch supplies and her brother, a wealthy New York real estate developer, sent her paintings that he purchased during his European travel. Knowing that she would need more training than she could hope to glean in Pomfret, Connecticut, her father arranged for her to travel. But where an affluent father sympathetic to his son’s ambitions simply dispatched him to London, Dr. Hall sent Anne first to Rhode Island, to visit friends and to take lessons from Samuel King, Gilbert Stuart’s first teacher, and then to New York City, to live with her brother and study with the noted Alexander Robertson.²⁶ Despite her many advantages, Hall painted in a world constrained by gender.

Print culture helped painters compensate for spotty formal, institutionalized training. Technical manuals, aesthetic treatises, and illustrated books and magazines increased in both number and variety in the years following the Revolution. These texts, both imported and domestic, promised to train painters who were affluent and laboring, urban and provincial, male and female. Drawing and painting manuals, especially, aimed to provide introductory, sequential training, showing reader-artists how to see by providing them with a schemata, a series of formulas for representing figures and landscapes in accord with conventions stretching back to the Renaissance.²⁷

As the nineteenth century progressed, manuals became more systematic. Carington Bowles’s The Artist’s Assistant, an English text reprinted in Philadelphia in 1794, advised students to begin by copying “the several features of the human face”—eyes, nose, and mouth, borrowed from Charles Le Brun’s drawings—which were included in the book before progressing to outlining profiles, full faces, and figures. By the 1830s, Rembrandt Peale’s Graphics insisted that anyone could learn to draw. “Try” was spelled out across the bottom of the book’s title page; subsequent editions added the promise that “Nothing is denied to well-directed Industry.” Assuming that his readers might never have seen an actual painter at work, Peale began by explaining how to hold a pencil and position oneself in front of an easel. He proceeded through penmanship, lines, and geometric shapes before showing readers how to identify the angles that gave shape to, say, a human nose.²⁸

The market for such books was partly, perhaps mostly, fueled by growing numbers of amateurs, keen to acquire the kind of polite and useful art offered in academies. But the boundary separating amateur and vocational training was porous at best. Would-be professionals benefited from many of the same texts that were sold to amateurs. Archibald Robertson pitched his drawing and painting manuals, like his school, at amateurs and professionals alike. And when teenaged William Dunlap took painting lessons from William Williams as a means of mastering his craft, he was surprised when his teacher presented him with a drawing book “such as I had possessed for years.”²⁹ One man’s preprofessional textbook was another’s leisure reading.

Manuals were useful for more than teaching a reader how to depict forms on paper or canvas. They borrowed heavily from the Anglo-American aesthetic canon to weigh in on what kinds of forms displayed the finest taste and why. Thus Robertson’s Elements of the Graphic Arts included essays on the “Theory of Painting” and the “Picturesque and the Beautiful” as well as instructions for schematizing the human profile as a series of triangles.³⁰ Painting and drawing books surely compensated for the absence of flesh-and-blood instructors and paucity of academic training. But they also composed yet another strand in a wide-ranging discourse on taste. They grounded painters in a shared set of aesthetic principles. Manuals thus helped distill taste into technique. In so doing, they worked to align the sensibilities and expectations of artists and patrons.

The Artist’s Eye

Mastering the manual skills and the technical knowledge that painting demanded was no small matter; the obstacles were considerable. Yet, when we read early national artists’ diaries, memoirs, and letters, it is striking how little they have to say about the acquisition of technique (exercised by the hand) and how much they have to say about the acquisition of taste (manifested in a good eye). In the narratives they spun about themselves, the difficulties of learning to treat canvas or ivory, to mix colors, to paint are eclipsed by the challenges and rewards of learning to see. Never mind that all their painstakingly acquired training took aim at both their eyes and their hands. In their telling, the process of becoming a painter was dominated by vision, yoked to intellect and imagination.

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.

Greenwood’s extant journals, for example, simultaneously mark his progress as a painter and museum keeper and figure that progress as the development of visual acuity. He succeeded at painting and museum keeping because he had learned to succeed at looking.³² Greenwood’s interest in art is apparent almost from the journal’s earliest entries, which note his acquisition of canvases stretched on “frames suitable for painting” and his early efforts at portraiture. During the years when he vacillated between a career in law and a career in art, Greenwood made cursory notes about his painting output. The entries changed in frequency and tone after 1813 when Greenwood decided to devote himself “strictly to painting.”³³ He began to take greater care in recording details about his artistic output. He was more likely to list his subjects individually and to single out exotic and unusual sitters like “Wha-Shing, a Chinese gentleman,” “John Smith a dwarf 18 years old,” and “Mr. Harry Gates of Hubbardston,” whose “face was distorted by a wound on Bunker Hill.” He noted subjects who were especially difficult to paint, like an eighty-three-year-old woman who was “so feeble” she could only “sit in position” a few minutes at a time.³⁴

Greenwood also began to record purchases that signaled attempts to cultivate his eye and to demonstrate his taste. He subscribed to Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio, which set itself up as a national arbiter of culture and the arts, and spent $25 to procure back issues. He purchased the published works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, including the Discourses, which provided a civic justification for art and codified the eighteenth-century Anglo-American aesthetic. He stepped up his acquisition of engraved prints and copies of European paintings and began to purchase plaster busts. By the end of 1817, he was able to boast that, notwithstanding several months’ illness, he had managed to “increase my Library, my collection of painting, prints, statuary &c. very considerably.”³⁵

The entries in Greenwood’s journal are so terse that it is tempting to treat the whole as an account book for tracking pictures painted and objects purchased. But if the journal functioned on that level—and it certainly did, especially after he opened the New England Museum—it also bore witness to Greenwood’s visual engagement with the world and his sustained attempts to develop his taste. The acquisition of things and experiences, like the notations that fixed them in his journal, served as a kind of commonplacing. Both sets of practices internalized a conventional set of aesthetic values and marked his growing connoisseurship. And both enabled him to position himself as someone who looked out at the world from the perspective of the tasteful few.

Occasionally his looking was dilatory and aimless, as it was on the December afternoon when he recorded that he “went to auction a little, & elsewhere a little, & thus littled away the day.” But generally it was purposeful and directed. He sought out private collections in and around Boston, the better to learn from others’ taste. Thus he traveled the ten miles to Milton to see the elegant paintings belonging to Miss Lucy Smith, a woman distinguished by her “good sense and elegant manner” and “Waited on Miss Hannah Adams” in order to see “Bonaparte’s pictures, St. Domingo, &c.” While painting a portrait in Pomfret, Connecticut, he sought out Anne Hall’s father and his “fine & valuable collection of pictures which he has shown me very politely.”³⁶ And when he spent an evening at Boston’s Mansion House in order to view “the very valuable collection of paintings & pictures” owned by John Hancock’s widow, he wrote that he hoped to be “improved by this examination.”³⁷

Traveling exhibitions offered Greenwood another opportunity for improvement. He took in panoramas of Paris, Constantinople, and the Battle of Waterloo, the last of which he attended with a fellow artist, Sarah Goodrich.³⁸ When American painters with academic ambitions displayed their masterpieces in Boston, Greenwood was invariably on hand. In 1815, he paid to see Henry Sargent’s Landing of the Fathers, which depicted the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock, and he may well have supplemented his viewing by reading the New England Palladium and Commercial Advertiser, which offered its readers step-by-step instructions for studying the painting, carefully dissecting the appropriate movement of the eye over the canvas.³⁹ A few months later, he made arrangements to exhibit Samuel Morse’s Dying Hercules when it arrived in Boston from the Royal Academy, where it had received “the highest approbation and applause.” He obtained both the enormous painting and the plaster model that Morse had made to help resolve the technical difficulties of representing the reclining figure. The exhibition, which took place in Greenwood’s painting rooms, generated revenue directly, through the 25-cent admission he charged, and indirectly, by increasing his visibility among potential clients. But housing the two pieces together also afforded Greenwood a rare opportunity for sustained, close study of a grand manner painting along with the even rarer opportunity to copy the painting by using the original painter’s method of looking back and forth between the three-dimensional model and two-dimensional canvas. The majestic painting had been in his rooms less than a week when he began to copy it. Whatever his profit from exhibiting the Dying Hercules, Greenwood made sure he capitalized on the chance to duplicate Morse’s method.⁴⁰

On the rare occasions when Greenwood ventured outside New England, he recorded his attempts to consume the world with his eyes. The year before he opened the museum, he traveled south and, like other American travelers, recorded his experiences as a series of views: He was disappointed by the appearance of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a “Principally Dutch” town marked by “a want of elegance in everything, no taste in buildings, dress, or manner.” The moment he crossed into the slave South, the “misery and stupidity,” the “ignorance & total want of taste” were to be seen everywhere. When he entered Washington, D.C., he “saw its desolation & barrenness.” In livelier cities, his looking became far more urgent. He devoted himself “diligently to seeing every curious thing” in Baltimore; in New York, he vowed “to see & examine everything relating to the fine arts.” Over the course of a single month, he spent time at the Peale family’s museums in both Baltimore and Philadelphia; visited the studios of painters ranging from Charles Bird King to Mary Way; browsed bookstores, print shops, and gilders’ workshops; attended concerts and the theater; and toured the U.S. Mint and the Philadelphia Athenaeum.⁴¹

Subsequent trips to New York and Philadelphia found Greenwood equally determined to “view … every interesting curiosity I could meet with.” During a twelve-hour stay in New York City in 1821, he saw the gallery of wax figures at the Shakespeare Gallery, the Rotunda where John Vanderlyn displayed his panoramas, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, the Mechanical Theater, Scudder’s Museum (which he visited twice, once during the day and again at night), and the theater.⁴² A few years later, during a week divided between New York City and Philadelphia, Greenwood’s agenda included the Peale, Scudder, and Sharpless museums; a medical college museum; both the American Academy of the Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he saw “West’s great picture of Christ Healing the Sick”; and a morning in New York spent “in still further examination of everything curious with Col. Trumbull.” “In fact,” he wrote of this flying visit, “I looked at everything with all my might.”⁴³

Like the curiosity cabinets assembled by wealthy collectors, these cities provided Greenwood with fodder for observation, consideration, and criticism. His compressed visits served, in heightened form, the same purpose as his more mundane habits of looking at home in Boston. The notations in his journal helped him to internalize the value of what he perceived and provided a forum for exercising his taste. Greenwood’s habits of looking and recording paid off: By 1821, the young man who had once hoped to “be improved” by Boston’s State House pictures could pick out the “good heads” in the Shakespeare Gallery and dismiss the rest as “gaudy trash.” He could commend the “elegance of arrangements & nature of the articles” in Scudder’s museum and regret that there was so very little at the American Academy of the Fine Arts to afford “entertainment or improvement.” By the time the journals end, in 1825, Ethan Allen Greenwood had become a connoisseur.⁴⁴

If Greenwood’s journal gestures toward the central role that looking played in artistic self-fashioning, William Dunlap’s autobiography, published as part of his monumental History, expounds on it. The multivolume History unfolds mostly as a chronologically organized biographical compendium. Over the course of thirty chapters, he plumbs the lives of American artists, native born and otherwise, for insights about national character analogous to those that could be found in biographical compendia celebrating the nation’s founders. As he explains to readers in the book’s introduction, just as readers “earnestly desire to know every particular relative to the first settlers who raised the standard of civilization in the wilderness,” so, too, did they want to learn about the artists “who raised and who supported the standard of taste, and decorated the social column with its Corinthian capital.”⁴⁵ Accordingly, the first volume of the History begins with colonial migrants like John Smibert and Robert Feke, picks up speed with Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, and assumes a distinctly national character with the ascendance of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and Dunlap himself.

Dunlap made no apologies for including himself in this pantheon and no apologies for taking up so many pages in it. His account of his own life is longer than his treatment of either Benjamin West or Gilbert Stuart and about the same as his coverage of Thomas Sully and Washington Allston combined. Dunlap began the History when he found himself in poor health and worse financial straits; his diary entries for the year leading up to the publication of his history of American art are a dismal catalog of diarrhea, laxatives, laudanum, and dwindling bank balances. Old and infirm, Dunlap may well have felt compelled to validate a career that had secured him neither economic stability nor public adulation.⁴⁶

Why Dunlap chose to place his life story at the center of American art history matters less than how he told that story. In the History, he cast his life as an instructive flop. Where the lives of West, Copley, Trumbull, and Allston could help train up a young painter in the way he should go, Dunlap’s own conduct “stood as a beacon to be avoided by all.”⁴⁷ He readily admitted that his was a failure of discipline, maturity, and nerve. But in the autobiography, Dunlap depicts these shortcomings as a failure of vision. The capacity for a certain kind of sight, he insisted, was the precondition for the creation and appreciation of art. It was also the quality that he himself most lacked.

Before Dunlap wrote about his problem, he painted it. He depicted his compromised vision in two miniature self-portraits, painted in 1805 and in 1812, years that saw him returning to art after failed stints in the theater. Both likenesses are dominated by the artist’s depiction of his eyes. The left eye is large, dark, and alert, whether it looks off into the distance or over his shoulder at the viewer. The right eye, blind as the result of a childhood accident, is clouded over. There is no iris, no pupil, and no mistaking this eye’s blindness. The absence of color signals the absence of sight. These portraits become more suggestive when paired against the portrait of Dunlap painted by Charles Cromwell Ingham for the National Academy of Design in 1838. Ingham’s likeness repeats the poses Dunlap had used on the miniatures. But in Ingham’s portrait, both eyes are large, dark, and apparently focused, as though reading. Ingham’s portrayal suggests that although Dunlap may have been blind in one eye, his appearance did not immediately announce the fact to observers who did not know him. Yet the inability to see mattered enough to Dunlap that he rendered it visible.

Figure 11. William Dunlap, self-portrait, ca. 1812. Watercolor on ivory, 3 × 2½ in. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of the Estate of Geraldine Woolsey Carmalt 1968.12.1.

Dunlap’s autobiography spells out what his early self-portraits imply. He returns repeatedly to sight in his account of his early years and his decision to become a painter, which occupies the first third of the narrative. The only child of “indulgent” parents, he received “no education in the usual acceptation of the word.” His boyhood schooling was interrupted first by war and then by injury. The latter interruption was the one that mattered: While playing outside with a group of boys who were pitching wood chips at one another, Dunlap was hit in the face and his right eye was “cut longitudinally.” “Weeks of confinement to my bed and more to my house” sufficed to restore his health, he recalled, but he never regained “the sight of the organ” (244, 250). During his convalescence and after, Dunlap developed a taste for drawing. By the time he recovered, his copies of engraved prints borrowed from the neighbors “might almost pass” for the originals.

Figure 12. Charles Cromwell Ingham, William Dunlap, 1838–1839. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. Courtesy of the National Academy Museum.

Encouraged by the admiration these drawings solicited, Dunlap settled on painting as his profession. The war made it difficult to secure a regular teacher, so he resolved to learn by doing. He painted his father first, moved on to other relatives, and when he had exhausted his supply of family, he turned to his friends. The moment he began to get applications from strangers, he “fixed [his] price as three guineas a-head” and “thus commenced portrait-painter in the year 1782” (250–251). To be sure, this was something less than a serious bid at a livelihood. “Living as the only and indulged child of my parents” removed the pressure of subsistence, he explained. But Dunlap’s efforts were promising enough that by 1784, his father was willing to send him to London to study with Benjamin West.

West did his best by Dunlap. He confirmed the young man’s talent on the basis of his “specimens”; helped him secure cheap lodgings with Robert Davy, a portraitist and art teacher; loaned him plaster casts to draw; and secured his admission to the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, as Dunlap explained, a trip that should have gone a long way toward securing his future career as an artist proved a fiasco. Hours that should have been spent in the studio were wiled away in drinking, dining, and then drinking some more. Entire weeks were dissolved into visits to the theater and pleasure trips into the countryside. Dunlap abandoned Davy’s rooms (and Davy’s tutelage) for more fashionable quarters and took up with a group of “half-pay officers” fresh from America who congregated at a local porterhouse (257–262). He never studied at the academy and although he was a regular guest at West’s dinner table, he managed to avoid his purported teacher’s studio almost entirely. He completed a few paintings—portraits and historical pieces—but saw little progress. This “life of unprofitable idleness” came to an abrupt end in 1787 when his father heard about his antics and summoned him home (265–266).

Looking back on what he judged a misspent youth, Dunlap found much to regret. And as he considered his failure, he returned time and again to his inability to see the world with a painter’s eye. Color posed the most fundamental obstacle. Because he taught himself to draw by copying engraved prints in ink, Dunlap worried that his “eye became satisfied with light and shadow” and learned to care little for “the excitement of colour.” He imagined that early intervention in the form of a knowledgeable teacher might have helped him to overcome this hurdle. But that was all in the realm of the hypothetical. Whether “from nature,” or injury, or training, he “did not possess a painter’s eye for colour” (250).

Unfortunately, his experiences in England only confirmed a shortsightedness that should have been apparent before he left New York. The nadir came during one of the few lessons West managed to give Dunlap. While painting a landscape, the great artist “elucidated the doctrine of light and shadow,” a doctrine “long … familiar to every artist.” First, West drew a circle on a blank canvas, then touched in light and shadow with white and black chalk, leaving the canvas itself to show the “half-tint and reflexes.” Next he directed Dunlap to examine the patterns of light and shadow on a piece of statuary to observe how the theory worked in practice. To extend the lesson from black and white to a full range of color, West returned the young man to his own unfinished landscape, pointing out that the “masses of foliage … were painted on the same principle.” The lesson was humiliating. That West felt compelled to return his prodigal student to first principles was “perhaps proof of the little progress I had made in the art I professed to study.” Once again, Dunlap demonstrated that he had a “better eye for form than for color” and was “discouraged by finding that I did not perceive the beauty or effect of colors as others appeared to do” (258–259).

Whatever the cause of Dunlap’s poor eye for color, it quickly became a metaphor for his poor taste and poor judgment more generally. The aspiring artist was all but blind to the art that surrounded him in London. On his first visit to West’s London studio, Dunlap remembered passing through a long gallery “hung with sketches and designs” that opened into a high-ceilinged room filled with “gigantic paintings” before entering the studio proper. “I gazed, with all the wonder of ignorance and the enthusiasm of youth upon the paintings,” he recalled. There was no overcoming this well-intentioned gawking. Despite living amidst “wonders of art,” he remained “blind as a savage.” In and around London, he “looked upon pictures without the necessary knowledge that would have made them instructive” (256). On an expedition to Burghley House, whose grounds had been designed by the picturesque landscape architect Capability Brown and whose rooms housed more than five hundred paintings, Dunlap took in pictures of “Madonnas and Bambinos, and Magdalens and Cruxifictions,” which “did not advance me one step” (263). The dazzling collection of the Duke of Marlborough offered “some pleasure” but “little profit.” After three years of this futile looking, his father summoned him home to New York. There, he was greeted by his father’s slaves, whose “black faces, white teeth, and staring eyes” held up a mirror to Dunlap’s own failure of vision (266). Despite the finest opportunities money could buy, William Dunlap returned little changed from the youth who had once “admired [Charles Willson] Peale’s gallery of pictures” simply because his ignorance led him “to admire every thing” (251).

Chester Harding succeeded where William Dunlap failed, and against far longer odds. Born into a rural New England household that lacked money, education, and pedigree, Harding had looked to the military, tavern keeping, and chair making for his livelihood before he learned to paint. He began with signs and moved on to portraits. Eventually, as his skill and reputation increased, he became one of the most successful academic-style portraitists working in the antebellum North.⁴⁸ Harding told the story of his remarkable rise twice. He wrote the best-known version, My Egotistigraphy, in 1865, near the end of his life, at the behest of his children and friends. Harding tells his life story in the first half of the memoir; in the book’s second half, letters and diary entries piece together his travels through Europe.

The Harding who comes to life in the first half of the Egotistigraphy is the one everyone remembers, and with good reason. This Harding is as unpretentious as he is funny. He gets rich but never forgets his humble beginnings. He pokes good-natured fun at his clients’ airs even as he values their trade. His is a workaday account of how he learned to paint and how he turned his genuine love of the practice into a lucrative career. There are no high-falutin’ claims to genius, no paeans to taste. Indeed, those two words are all but absent from the first half of the memoir, although they turn up often enough in the diaries that Harding kept while he was abroad.⁴⁹

To be sure, Harding was alive to the magic of a good likeness. He began to paint portraits after becoming “enamored” with the second-rate efforts of an itinerant he hired to paint him and his wife. The prospect of painting consumed him; he “thought of it by day and dreamed of it by night.” And when Harding made his own stab at a portrait, a picture of his wife, he “became frantic with delight; it was like the discovery of a new sense I could think of nothing else.”⁵⁰ But his growing ambition, an ambition first articulated as the desire to become a painter and then as the desire to become a fine one, was realized by doing. Success was the culmination of hard work, endless practice, and close attention to the technical demands of his craft. Success was also the product of business acumen, including the real estate investments that helped support his family while he worked as an itinerant. Harding measured his progress by the rising profits he could demand from an increasingly genteel clientele. In the first half of My Egotistigraphy, Harding sketches the artist as a self-made everyman.⁵¹

Some thirty years before his family coaxed the Egotistigraphy out of him, Harding told his story differently. In a long letter written for inclusion in Dunlap’s History, Harding recounted his transformation from sign painter to portrait painter in terms that drew sharp distinctions between painting signs (“a useful art,” “a vocation”) and painting faces (a “profession,” an “honourable” profession, a “newly discovered goddess”). In the narrative he produced for Dunlap, Harding traveled constantly not to earn money but to educate his eyes. He went from Kentucky to Philadelphia in order to spend “five or six weeks in looking at the portraits of Mr. Sully and others”; a few years later, a trip to Boston was “chiefly … a pilgrimage to Stuart.” Trips to the East Coast were intended to hone his eye rather than his technique. Visual acuity naturally resulted in technical acuity.⁵²

Harding took pains to define himself as a “self-taught” artist in ways that removed his work and, by extension, himself from the ranks of mere craftsmen. Speculating on the success he enjoyed in Boston in the 1820s, when he claimed to have attracted more sitters than Gilbert Stuart, he considered the possibility that affluent patrons were attracted by the novelty of sitting for a painter who was a “backwoodsman, newly caught.” Patrons and “superficial observers,” he concluded, invested the phrase “self-taught artist” with misplaced cachet. More knowledgeable judges, he sniffed, understood the label as a symbol of labor, signaling “no other virtue … than that of perseverance.” But for his part, Harding used the term only to indicate that he did not have “any particular instructor”; he did not owe his success to the tutelage of a Benjamin West or an Edward Savage.⁵³ Sidestepping the manual labor suggested by “perseverance,” he explained, “It matters little how an artist arrives at a sort of midway elevation, at which all with common industry may arrive.” What counted was genius, which enabled someone like himself to soar “above the common level,” leaving “his less favoured brethren to follow in his track with mingled feelings of envy and admiration.”⁵⁴

Harding realized his genius not as an itinerant canvassing the American frontier, but as an explorer surveying a “wilderness of art” in London. At first, he confessed, the overwhelming number and variety of paintings dulled his senses, making him “indifferent to all the sublime works that were within my reach.” Still, he persisted in looking and “by degrees” began to “see new beauties every day” in the Old Masters. Just as his eyes began to open, his money began to run out. He fell back on portraiture to support himself and immediately attracted a devoted and aristocratic clientele. His sitters provided much more than cash; they ushered him into a world of exquisite taste and sumptuous art collections. Noble patrons invited him to spend weeks at the “splendid” Hamilton Palace, seat of the Duke of Hamilton and home to one of the finest picture galleries in Great Britain. They enabled him to visit Holkham Hall, a seat of “luxury and elegance” belonging to the Coke family. There, he told Dunlap, his mornings “were chiefly spent looking at the ‘old masters,’” his afternoons in hunting wild game, and his evenings benefiting from the dinner conversation of the aristocrats, politicians, and artists who were congregated around the seventy-year-old Lord Coke and Coke’s twenty-one-year-old wife. For readers of the History, Harding cast the time spent at England’s magnificent country houses as leisurely opportunities to soak up art, taste, and what he called the “high life.”⁵⁵

In fact, Harding’s forays to these storied estates were, at best, busman’s holidays. The account he penned for Dunlap bears slight resemblance to the one he recorded in his diary, which reveals him as a laborer, albeit an elevated one. He noted that his first attempt to gain admission to Hamilton Palace was rebuffed, despite the fact that he carried a letter of introduction from the Duke of Sussex, because the family was “constantly annoyed” by inquiries from vendors and tradesmen of all sorts. During the two weeks he spent at Holkham Hall, he painted four portraits, including a “kit-cat”-sized likeness of “Mr. Blakie, Mr. Coke’s Steward.” A working artist, he was constantly at his easel. His status was confirmed in the Holkham Hall account books, which list him as a “limner.”⁵⁶

Harding’s inflated account of the time he spent in England was a savvy business strategy. His immersion in the world of Old Masters and tasteful aristocrats was calculated to enhance his American reputation. It seems to have worked. In the coda Dunlap added to Harding’s “frank and manly” letter, he took pains to celebrate the former “backwoodsman” as a gentleman, possessed of pleasing manners and appearance, who had purchased his “own beautiful country seat.” And he confirmed Harding’s account of himself with a personal recollection: Years earlier, Harding had called on Dunlap in his painting room, introduced himself, and provided “proof of a true eye and taste” by “immediately” picking out “the best head” Dunlap had set out for display. Together, Dunlap and Harding gave readers a portrait of the artist as a man defined by his eye and by his taste.⁵⁷

Why did thirty years make such a difference in the way Harding told his story? In 1834, seven years after returning from Britain, he was solvent but hardly renowned. He was still rebuilding his network of Boston-based patrons and making a name for himself as a painter of statesmen in Washington, D.C. Naturally, he was keen to distance himself from his earlier, backwoods persona. With one eye trained on potential patrons and the other on fellow artists, the Harding of 1834 was bent on establishing his credentials as a man who warranted inclusion in the History not because of where he came from but because of what he had become. By 1865, Harding wrote for an audience of family and friends that included men of influence from New England to Washington, D.C. He counted John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Daniel Webster, John Marshall, and Bushrod Washington among his clients. Secure in his social, financial, and professional success, Harding could frame his life story as a distinctly American picaresque. Then, too, around midcentury many Americans had begun to turn away from romantic conceptions of the artist, endorsing instead the ideal of the artist as a hardheaded businessman. By 1865, the life story of an artist whose self-making depended on the work of his hands as much as his eyes and whose self-fashioning resulted as much from time spent in Paris, Kentucky, as time spent in Paris, France, had an appeal that it lacked in the 1830s. Both the 1834 narrative and the 1865 narrative depict an artist in the American grain. Placed side by side, they show us how much that grain had changed.⁵⁸

Life Among the Connoisseurs