Art in America Before the Revolution , As a Subject

A rt in Am eric a Befo re th e R evo lu tio n EDWI N SWI FT BALCH Your Excellency : Fellow M emb ers of th e Society of Colonial Art in America before the Revolution , as a subject for study , divides itself perforce into two divisions . The first is the native indigenous art , the art of the American an Indi s , or Amerinds , as some ethnologists now call them . which is prehistoric to the landing of the Northmen on the American continent , which still lingers in some places , but which is gradually dying out with its makers . This art o . extended all over America , fr m Patagonia to Canada Except perhaps in Alaska and along the Arctic it is prae m en . tically one art , the art of the Red It varies locally , so that one may say that there are several subdivisions of this f art , but it is always su ficiently similar as to make it almost f certain that it is the art of one race . It is also su ficiently distinct from the arts of the races of the Old World as to make it almost certain that it is prob ably mainly an autochthonous art ; that is , an art which grew up on the soil and was not imported . One wave of this art at one period flowed over the plains of the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers , namely the Moundb uilders s art of the , among who e mounds some most an d interesting potteries sculptures have been found . A later wave , or perhaps merely descent through time , spread 1 4 . ! U art ver the nited States the art of our own Indians , an which extended all over the original Ame rican Colonies . —in 1 06—a Only the other day October , 9 handsomely decorated red pottery vase was found whilst digging the W foundations of some skyscraper in New York City , here it is n ow on exhibition in the American Museum of Natural History . This art rose to its greatest heights in Peru and Mexico . In Peru it is principally found in the shape of s potteries , in many case admirably sculpted into human m heads or human figures , or into ani als . Many of these a l are sculptural ; many are c ricatura ; some , showing the ' ff i e ects of disease , are pathological . These Peruv an heads , E curiously enough , often resemble uropean heads , and one might ascribe them to Spanish infl uence had not such quan b e d tities been dug up in prehistoric graves . In Mexico, si es and . potteries , there are some pictures many stone sculptures Some of the heads are grandly do ne and resemble Egyptian u h a l i . o s heads M c of the Mexican art , unf rtun te y , loath ’ an some d hideous . The motives are snakes and death s I in . t heads is not art which has evolved these carvings , but an attempt to bring out in stone some ghastly supe r stitio ns which must have been rampant through Central ’ h h e e t America . There is some evidence t at t d a h s heads t a o f were rela ed to cannibalism . At any rate , study their art has made me feel that Cortez did a rather goo d work M x li n when he wiped out old e ican civi zatio , and that it is useless to waste sympathy on such a gang of toughs as Montezuma and the Aztec priests . I consider some phases of Mexican art as th e lowest and most degraded ever e r ached by any art . s Along the Arctic we find the art of the E kimo , a race probably allied to the North Asiatics ; and along the shores of Alaska , we find an art which , while it has some Mexican a s x tr its , showing ome cousinship to Me ican art , yet in the s main is related clo ely to the art of the Brown races , the Polynesians and the Australasians generally ; to the art of New ! . ealand , of Rapa Nui , of Papua , and of Hawaii The second division of my subject is the art of the t intrusive white races of Europe , which its makers brough with them across the Atlantic into the New World . This S is theEM , which cannot be termed correctly - l t - b ut n la Colonial art , because it is rea ly no hing tra sp nted European art . The art of Colonial times is a purely intrusive art , an i - art which was full fledged before reaching Americansh o res . o e It was br ught over by the Europ an immigrants , and if we turn over the pages of history we find that there were three main streams of European immigration into America : a French stream into Canada ; an English and Dutch stream into the United States ; a Spanish and Portugu e se stream o . o int Central and South America If , then , we lo k at the arts of these nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen turies , we find the immediate parents of the art of America in Colonial times . V I do not share the iew , held by some ethnologists , that religious beliefs have anything to do with the underlying motives of an artist . It is the esthetic sense , which all men a have in a greater or lesser degree , which m kes some men want to paint or sculpt . Some men like to imitate , to try o a c t to repr duce men or anim ls or lands apes , because hese appeal to wh at we may call their esthetic faculties . But as it is necessary for most artists to live by their for s work , the demand certain form of art is pretty certain to regulate the output . And as the ruling church in France and in Spain not only admitted paintings and sculptures to its buildings , but paid to have them , it is only natural that many artists in th ose countries made their living by painting r and sculpting c uc ifi xio ns and madonnas and saints . This e S was don even more in pain than in France , and though 6 we find some fine portraiture in Spain , with Velasquez as the great master , there was done for churches and convents still more painting , whose best known Spanish makers are ! Murillo , Ribera and urbaran . As a necessary corollary to this , the art that came into Spanish Mexico was this same church art , which descended immediately from such painters as Murillo , Ribera and ! - urbaran . And in the churches of Mexico to day there are many such pictures which either were brought over from the o Old World , or were painted in Mexic by painters following these already conventionalized traditio nal subj ects . The same is true of old French Canada , only in a lesser degree . There are still in ! uebec some few church pictures which certainly antedate the Revolution , but I cannot say whether these were painted on American soil . In Holland and in England the situation of the artist was quite different from what it was in Spain or in France . Not only did the ruling churches not pay for pictures and sculptures , but they did not tolerate them in their buildings , and in some cases the zeal of their adherents went so far that , if I am not mistaken , they smashed the works of art that had come down to them fro m earlier times . The artists therefore naturally worked in other directions , in the lines of least resistance and most profit , and in the seventeenth century we find a great art in full bloom in Holland , with Helst Rembrandt , Franz Hals and Van der in portraiture ; oo Paul Potter and Cuyp in animal pictures ; Pieter de H ghe , Jan Steen and M etz u in genre ; and Hobbema and Ruysdael in landscape , among its leading exponents . This Dutch art must have been well supported or it would never have reached the output , both in quality and quantity , which makes it one of the great art epochs of all time . o It is a curi us fact , nevertheless , that the greatest painter , perhaps , of religious subj ects was a Dutchman , “ ! “ a Th y . e t Rembrandt In his Supp r Emmaus , e Hol 7 r Family , the etching of The Hundred Guilde Plate , “ ! and The Presentation in the Temple , for instance , possi b “ ! bly ecause these pictures were not potboilers , there is a technical mastery and a depth of feeling probably unattained by any Italian or Spanish painters in religious subjects , and w s in this line , as ell as in all group of figures or in portraits , Rembrandt stands easily at the top . In England art advanced much less rapidly than in ’ Holland . Doubtless this was due partly to England s insu larit y , partly to a certain inaptitude of the English race to for art , and partly the then still strongly developed system , which among the Hindus is called the caste system , and which two centuries ago prevailed suffi ciently in Eng land for royalty and the nobility to be practically the only important patrons of art . Landscape did not grow up in England until the latter half of the eighteenth century , when Wilson became its first , but now almost forgotten , master . Royalty and aristocracy , however , probably con sidered that they were goo d -loo king and were willing to pay , in some cases cash , to see their features on canvas , and the result was that in the sixteenth , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were some good po rtrait painters in England , almost all foreigners , among whom may be l mentioned Holbein , C ouet , Antonio Moro , Sir Godfrey K Sir neller , Vandyke , Peter Lely , Raeburn , Sir joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough .

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