MAKING AMERICAN TASTE: NARRATIVE ART FOR A NEW DEMOCRACY I. Importing Grand Manner Taste Benjamin West (1738–1820), Chryseis Returned to her Father, Benjamin West (1738–1820), Aeneas and Creusa, 1771. Oil on 1771. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. William H. Webb, William H. Webb, 1865.1 1865.2 West took inspiration from Homer’s The Iliad to show the helmeted The Trojan War forms the backdrop to Aeneas and Creusa, named for Odysseus returning Chryseis to her elderly father, Chryses, a priest of the husband and wife whose story is recounted in Virgil’s The Aeneid. Apollo. The reunion takes place beneath a statue of Apollo, who had Aeneas explains to Creusa and their son Ascanius the meaning of the answered Chryses’ prayers for his daughter’s release from captivity at omens (including the meteor streaking through the sky) that precipitate the hands of King Agamemnon. When this painting and its pendant, their flight from Troy. Aeneas and Creusa, debuted at London’s Royal Academy in 1771, these Neoclassical paintings represented the height of artistic taste. II. Taste and History Painting Louis Lang (1814–1893), Return of the 69th (Irish) Regiment, George Henry Boughton (1833–1905), Pilgrims Going to N.Y.S.M. from the Seat of War, 1862. Oil on canvas. New-York Church, 1867. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Historical Society, Gift of Louis Lang, 1886.3. Photo (during The Robert L. Stuart Collection, S-117 treatment) courtesy Williamstown Art Conservation Center, Called the “Painter of New England Puritanism,” Boughton often 2010 took inspiration from books, relying here on William Henry Bartlett’s Newly conserved and on public view for the first time in over 60 1853 history, The Pilgrim Fathers. This image of colonists solemnly years, Lang’s massive canvas documents the return of New York’s processing through a snowy wood to worship in the distant 69th Irish Regiment from Civil War battle on July 27, 1861. Shown settlement received warm praise when it debuted at the Royal against the dramatic backdrop of New York Bay, the scene captures Academy in London in 1867. the emotional and physical tumult that electrified the welcoming crowds. Lang’s mission to provide a complete impression of an actual urban event on such a scale is unmatched in 19th-century American art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), The Puritan, 1899. Bronze. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. James Hazen Hyde, 1946.253 The Puritan is adapted from Saint-Gaudens’s life-size statue of Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), a prominent figure in Massachusetts history. Considered by one commentator as “the finest embodiment of Puritanism in our art,” the sculpture was issued in reduced versions beginning in 1894. For these, Saint- Gaudens renamed the piece, converting it to a generalized tribute to the ideals associated with the austere and fervent determination of colonial New Englanders. III. Translating Literary Taste into Visual Experience Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), Peter Stuyvesant and the Robert Walter Weir (1803–1889), Saint Nicholas, 1837-1838. Oil Trumpeter, 1835. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, on wood panel. New-York Historical Society, Gift of George Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.28 A. Zabriskie, 1951.76 Durand’s first major literary genre painting Peter Stuyvesant and the Saint Nicholas is one of Weir’s more fully elaborated images of the Trumpeter illustrates an episode from Washington Irving’s 1809 saint–cum–Christmas elf. Recalling 17th-century Dutch genre satire, A History of New York. Durand’s interpretation matches paintings, the work relies on an amalgam of Christian, Dutch and Irving’s text in its comic portrayal of the Dutch colonial governor’s Knickerbocker symbols—for example, the partially peeled orange rage at his army’s defeat. (referring to the Dutch House of Orange and the traditional Christmas-stocking filler). Saint Nicholas achieved iconic status in Knickerbocker New York, where he became a politicized symbol of elitist cultural taste. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816–1868), Princess Elizabeth in the Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855), The Cavalier's Return, Tower, 1860. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, The 1847. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Bequest of Kate Robert L. Stuart Collection, S-187 Warner, 1914.2 Leutze’s painting shows the future Elizabeth I after her interrogation Purchased by the American Art-Union after Woodville had been living in the Tower of London in 1554. The matter involved Elizabeth’s in Europe, The Cavalier’s Return shows a toddler coaxed toward a loyalty to the Protestant cause in the face of Queen Mary’s militant father whose military service under Charles I had made him a stranger Catholicism. Elements such as the statue of the Virgin and Child to his family. The painting encompasses ideas of reunion and were occasionally interpreted as evidence of Elizabeth’s religious separation and may allude to slavery, since the institution cruelly ambivalence, insinuating that her motives were founded on political separated families. rather than spiritual matters. IV. Scenes of Everyday Life and Average Taste William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), Farmers Bargaining (later Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), The Pedlar, 1836. Oil on canvas. known as Bargaining for a Horse), 1835. Oil on canvas. New-York New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Historical Society, Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, Fine Arts, 1858.26 1858.59 Shrewd and boisterous, the stereotypical Yankee pedlar was the Described by a contemporary reviewer as “an image of pure spinner of yarns told to distract his customers. Here the master and Yankeeism,” this painting portrays two men shrewdly negotiating the mistress of the house seem immune to the pedlar’s patter, thus sale of a horse. By 1835 Mount had committed himself to focusing permitting the painting to be interpreted as a celebration of the only on American subjects, fearing that the “splendor of European art” common American’s ability to resist being duped. would somehow taint his vision. Francis W. Edmonds (1806–1863), The Wind Mill, ca. 1858. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, The Robert L. Stuart Collection, S-217 Set in a carefully ordered, albeit modest household, this inconsequential episode finds its dramatic peak in the contrast between the child’s intense excitement and the disciplined attentiveness of the family dog. What is unusual, however, is that Edmonds (himself the father of a large family) portrayed a playful moment shared by a father and son within the domestic sphere normally presided over by women. V. Ambiguous Narratives: Picturing the Outsider Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813–1884), The Last of the John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910), The Indian Hunter, Race, 1847. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, 1860. Bronze. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. George Gift of Edwin W. Orvis, 1931.1 A. Zabriskie, 1939.390 Painted two years after the phrase “Manifest Destiny” was coined, The Indian Hunter was widely acknowledged as the turning point in The Last of the Race centers on the plight of dispossessed Indian Ward’s career; an enlarged version of it was the first sculpture by an nations as they were pushed to the edge of the continent by the American artist to be installed in Central Park. Ward’s vigorous inexorable western movement of white settlers. naturalism, heightened by the gleaming bronze surface that enhanced various textures, was hailed as evidence of the artist’s distinctly American outlook. Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Negro Life at the South, 1859. Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910), The Window (later known Oil on linen. New-York Historical Society, The Robert L. Stuart as A Window, House on Hudson River), 1863. Oil on canvas. Collection, S-225 New-York Historical Society, The Robert L. Stuart Collection, S- 71 Negro Life at the South secured Johnson’s reputation as one of the nation’s foremost genre specialists when it was displayed at the The Window portrays a black nursemaid holding a white infant at a National Academy of Design in 1859. Although the painting depicts window overlooking the Hudson River. The painting was exhibited in the yard behind slave quarters in Washington, D.C., most critics New York in 1863, not long after the Emancipation Proclamation imagined that it portrayed a scene of plantation life, an assumption had gone into effect, generating anxiety that the North would be that led to the painting’s popular title, The Old Kentucky Home. flooded with ex-slaves. The painting’s message is ambiguous. Although portrayed in a harmonious household environment, the woman remains contained within an economic system that promises no release to the radiant world beyond the curtained window. William Henry Burr (1819–1908), The Intelligence Office, 1849. James Henry Cafferty (1819–1869), The Sidewalks of New York, Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Purchase, Abbott- 1859. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Purchase, Lenox Fund, 1959.46 1983.39 Burr’s depiction of a woman inspecting prospective servants at an Painted soon after the financial panic of 1857, The Sidewalks of employment agency was ignored when it was shown at the National New York underscores the yawning divide between rich and poor in Academy of Design in 1850. Although competently executed, the antebellum New York. Although the scenario is an unlikely one— painting’s narrative violated the boundaries of refinement by such a well-dressed little girl would not have been unaccompanied referring to disreputable agency practices; newspapers frequently in public—the situation emphasizes the fact that barriers separating reported that the proprietors of brothels disguised themselves as social classes were dissolving.