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One
"O, That We Had Cathedrals in
America"
Around 1867, American painters
rose slowly from a silent past. Their status in the
United States had hardly begun to change, and
indifference had for many years been their daily
bread. Their careers, like that of Thomas
Worthington Whittredge, had until then developed
within the narrow world that was America. Born in
1820 into a farm family, near Springfield, Ohio,
Worthington Whittredge was a gifted child, clever at
drawing. To avoid the wrath of his father, who
considered all artists "lost souls," he
chose to learn the craft of lettering and poster
design. He produced for local artisans and tradesmen
signs on doors and storefronts that read "Smith
Carpenter" or "Thompson Grocery
Store."
This very limited trade soon
bored him. In Indianapolis, a photographer
introduced him to the technique of daguerreotype, in
which he naturally progressed to portraiture. A few
months later, benefiting from the dynamism of
Cincinnati and its blossoming art school, Whittredge
took some classes before opening his own portrait
studio in Charleston, Virginia. Thanks to quick
mastery of the technique, he made a decent living.
But before long he began to paint; he produced
landscapes, showing three works at the Cincinnati
Academy of Fine Arts and about ten others at the
National Academy of Design in New York. In 1849,
honored with commissions and letters of credit from
Joseph Longworth and William Scarborough, two
Cincinnati patrons who had secured work for him, he
was drawn into a current that would carry most
painters of his time and struck out for
Europe.
With the help of fellow Americans
already abroad, Whittredge toured the main European
academies. In the autumn of 1849, he spent a few
days in the Barbizon artist colony, in the
Fontainebleau forest near Paris. He was remembered
by local painters as being "on his way to
Dusseldorf." His memoirs note that while at
Barbizon in the company of Jean-Francois Millet, he
met a group of French artists who impressed him as
genuine iconoclasts. Although he appreciated their
spirit, their painting left him cold. With Emanuel
Leutze, he spent five years in and around the
Dusseldorf Academy, made friends with the painter
Karl Friedrich Lessing,and worked studiously on his
landscape technique. After that, he traveled to
Italy, where-with his friends Buchanan, Haseltine,
Gifford, and Bierstadt-he sketched innumerable
landscapes around Naples before repairing to Paris,
Brussels, and London.
In 1859, back in the
United States after ten years in Europe, Whittredge
settled with other landscape artists in New York
City, at 15 West Tenth Street, a magic address in
the history of American art; this handsome building
of studios was to become the center of the New York
art world in the coming years. Suddenly feeling
himself at the heart of everything, the boy from
Springfield, Ohio, had trouble getting his bearings.
"This was the most crucial period of my
life," he wrote. "It was impossible for me
to shut out from my eyes the works of the great
landscape painters which I had so recently seen in
Europe, while I knew well enough that if I was to
succeed, I must produce something new and which
might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings.
I was in agony."
His European experience
had been a culture shock, a total upheaval, a bout
of vertigo. He needed five full working years to get
back on his feet. Then, supported by the fraternity
of John W. Casilear, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford
R. Gifford, and Jervis McEntee, he traveled as much
as he could, absorbing his own country, from the
Mississippi River to the deserts of New Mexico, from
the Catskills to the Rocky Mountains, from the Rio
Grande to the Shawangunks. Managing at last to
"shut out from his eyes" his memories of
his master, the painter Claude Lorrain, he was able
to develop a very personal sensitivity to the
American landscape. In 1864 came his first
post-European success, The Old Hunting
Grounds. The painting depicted a stand of somber
birch trees, with a splash of light at its center;
in front, a riverbank and an abandoned old Indian
canoe. This canvas, shown at the National Academy of
Design, was promptly acquired by the collector James
W. Pinchot and, three years later, was exhibited at
the Paris Exposition Universelle. American
critics wrote that by including the Indian canoe,
the painter had made an important political and
historical comment. For many years, they considered
this work an icon.
In 1860, Worthington
Whittredge was elected to the National Academy of
Design. At age forty, this tall, striking man
appeared strangely grave, an eccentric with a
colossal forehead, a gigantic black beard, and
somber, protruding eyes under immense eyebrows. In
fact, his face tempted many a portraitist, such as
his friend Leutze, who dressed him in an old uniform
as the father of the American nation for Washington
Crossing the Delaware, his most famous canvas.
Whittredge was well-liked, generous, hard-working,
studious, and considerate toward his peers; in 1875
they elected him president of the National Academy
of Design, a position he held until
1877.
Concentrating on the panoramas of his
homeland, he steadfastly pursued a career as a
landscapist. Carrying his gun, stool, umbrella, and
paint box, he set out on often dangerous expeditions
to discover new subjects. He worked particularly
hard on a canvas called Crossing the Ford,
struggling especially with one obsessive detail: a
stand of cottonwood trees. Determined to get it
right, he consulted guides of the region, traveled
back to Colorado, and, between Denver and Loveland
Pass, searched for several months for a particular
group of trees he had discovered four years earlier
along the banks of the Cache la Poudre River. He
finally found the place and worked desperately,
producing sketch after sketch, to render an accurate
version of this singular group of trees. Only after
two years' effort could he assure himself that he
had succeeded.
At the 1876 Centennial
Philadelphia Exposition, a critic hailed Crossing
the Ford as a "model of excellence." Two
years later, another one described it as "the
archetype of American landscapes." No wonder,
therefore, that it was acquired by the greatest
collector of Whittredge's work, Othniel C. March, a
paleontologist at Yale and director of the
university's Peabody Museum. As a scientist, March
passionately admired Whittredge's work both for his
topographical precision and his feeling for local
atmosphere. In 1901, Whittredge received a silver
medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New
York, before showing one hundred and twenty-five
landscapes at the Century Association in New York
City.
A dedicated and hard-working craftsman,
Whittredge won national acclaim and
recognition-through numerous sales and honors-long
before his death in 1910. His rise from a dutiful
midwestern farm boy hinged on his success in merging
the techniques he had acquired in Europe with the
natural realities of his native land, producing
abundant and popular works in which he developed a
distinctive pictorial vision. In effect, his was the
classic trajectory, flat and unadorned-the
archetypal career for an American painter of his
time.
With rare exceptions, those who came of
age during America's colonial period could not hope
for a career even remotely like Whittredge's. Their
efforts were regarded as "no more valuable than
any other useful trade . . . like that of the
carpenter, tailor or shoemaker, not as one of the
most noble arts in the world." Artists
committed themselves above all to documenting
reality, depicting a scene, a face, a place as
accurately as their skills permitted. They mastered
a technique, using it as a tool. "The
democratic nations," Tocqueville wrote,
"will cultivate those arts which are likely to
render their life comfortable, rather than those
whose aim will be to render it more beautiful; they
give the edge to the useful over the beautiful and
want the beautiful to be useful."
As
early as 1766, the great American portrait painter
John Singleton Copley was complaining about working
"among people entirely destitute of all just
Ideas of the Arts." "I think myself
peculiarly unlucky in living in a place into which
there has not been one portrait brought that is
worthy to be called a Picture within my
memory," he wrote to his colleague Benjamin
West. The nineteenth-century American critic John
Neal described what he regarded as his own true
moment of "artistic initiation," which
occurred during a visit to the local shoemaker when
he was a child living in a small town in Maine:
"I saw pasted on the wall, over the shoemaker's
bench, a pen-and-ink head, which delighted me beyond
measure . . . this little affair, though unfinished,
I looked upon as a marvel. I went up to the garret,
and there, seating myself on an old leather trunk,
near a little window, covered with dust and cobwebs,
went to work and made copy after copy, some of which
were traced . . . until I had every scratch of the
pen daguerreotyped upon my memory. This, I believe,
was the beginning of my experience in
art."
Certainly, exceptional cases
existed, such as Copley himself, who had great
success attracting wealthy patrons; and Benjamin
West, who, thanks to the support of his Philadelphia
patron, traveled to Italy as early as 1760, before
being appointed History Painter to the court of
George III in England in 1772, and twenty years
later, president of the British Royal Academy. As
the first celebrated American expatriate artist,
West welcomed generations of young American painters
in London, eager to work on large historical
canvases.
The American Revolution spurred
history painting, then the most prestigious of all
genres in the world. "I could not be happy
unless I am pursuing the intellectual branch of the
art," wrote Samuel Morse to his parents from
London in May 1814. "Portraits have none of it;
landscape has some of it; but history has it
wholly." In 1825, he became a founder and the
first president of the National Academy of Design in
New York, but ten years later, when Morse completed
his vast Salon du Louvre, he was unable to sell it.
Disheartened, he abandoned his career as a painter
and decided to go back to science, since he was also
an "engineer of considerable
talent."
American paintings of the
antebellum years fell into three categories:
portraits, landscapes, and history. Portrait
craftsmen were usually itinerant artists who, like
James Guild or William Dunlap, did portraits on
demand. For years, from Portland to Boston, from
Boston to Newport, then to Utica, Saratoga, New
York, or Philadelphia, Dunlap set up his easel and
sold his works, before being elected in 1826 to the
National Academy of Design. Recognizing that the
areas of production and consumption did not
coincide, certain portrait artists of the North
established themselves in Southern cities such as
Baltimore, Charleston, Norfolk, or New Orleans,
meeting other painters and seeking new clients.
Similarly, Southern portraitists migrated north to
centers such as Philadelphia, New York, or Newport
to seek out the wealthy collectors.
In 1803,
under Thomas Jefferson's presidency, the United
States doubled its territory through the Louisiana
Purchase, negotiated with France, thus extending its
western frontier to the Pacific. An image of
American democracy-its ethical principles, its
history, its territory-began to emerge, drawing on a
new conception of Nature, all-powerful and pure, the
antidote to European corruption. In 1804, Jefferson
dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the
Missouri River, with the objective of finding the
route through the Northwest Territory that would
join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The project,
lived as a national adventure, aroused the
imagination of the American people and made them
aware of the immensity, beauty, and abundance of
their country. "The eyes of your countrymen are
turned toward you," wrote Jefferson to the
leaders of the expedition. During the voyage, Clark
noted excitedly in his diary: "I don't believe
that in the whole universe there could be landscapes
comparable in sumptuousness with these which we are
seeing at the moment." In this very young
democracy, with scarcely any historical tradition, a
veritable cult of the national geography took root:
among the marvels of America was the land itself. A
prejudice against the artifice of European
landscapes, transformed by the human hand, echoed
the criticism of the continent's corrupt monarchies:
America's Nature became a metaphor for
democracy.
The painter Thomas Cole developed
a metaphysical concept of the American landscape,
this "oasis that yet remains to us, and thus
preserves the germs of a future and purer
system." The natural majesty of the Hudson
River struck him as more impressive than that of the
Rhine, for "its shores are not besprinkled with
venerated ruins or the palaces of the princes,"
and the Connecticut River, whose surroundings
remained "trackless wilderness." Cole
went further, pointing out to his fellow painters
that landscape, the only domain in which they could
excel, remained the very solution to religion's
dilemma, since the affinity between the painter and
Nature was identical to the relationship the
Puritans had posited between Man and God. Nature
painters such as John James Audubon and George
Catlin continued to depict bison hunting, Indian
rituals, and the astonishing range of rare American
flora and fauna in a precisely detailed style. All
in all, landscape artists remained the lucky ones.
During the Civil War, American history painting
enjoyed a last, brief vogue: battle scenes allowed
painters or illustrators to work while expressing
support for whatever political cause they believed
in, until the newly invented medium of photography
brutally drove them out of business.
Not
incorrectly, local artists identified their pathetic
status in America-and its sharp contrast to that of
their brethren in Europe-with their country's
religious past. "The religion practiced by the
first emigrants and the one that they are
bequeathing to their descendants," wrote
Tocqueville, "simple, austere, nearly primitive
in its principles, is an enemy to outward signs of
pomp and ceremony, and generally little favorable
toward the fine arts." Since the seventeenth
century, when America was a territory of scattered
farming communities, religious leaders wielded
enormous influence over their flocks. In sermons,
they would recount the stories of the first
Pilgrims, these men "of small account at home.
. . . If you will follow them back to their homes,
you will now and then find a mansion, never a
castle, but almost always a yeoman's house or a
laborer's hovel," the minister Henry Ward
Beecher recalled during the commemoration of the
240th anniversary of the landing at Plymouth Rock.
"It is hardly possible to make barrenness more
bare of all appliances for the senses than was New
England," he added. "Yet there arose in
the popular mind a vast and stately system of
truth."
Excerpted from Painting American by
Annie Cohen-Solal
Copyright 2001 by Annie Cohen-Solal. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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