Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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,