• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Background of Colonial American Portraiture: Some Pages from a European Notebook BY LOUISA DRESSER HE Study of the history of art is as subject to the Tchanges of enthusiasm and emphasis as any other, and it is interesting to consider a fundamental shift of attitude which has occurred during the past twenty years on the part of students of American colonia! portraiture. It is now attracting the attention of a new generation of scholars already trained in the history of art. The first persons to interest themselves in this subject, of whom the Reverend William Bentley about 1800 was an early example and Charles K. Bolton, author of Portraits of the Founders, 1919, 1926, an outstanding later one, were concerned with the likeness. Was the portrait a genuine contemporary representation of the sitter.^ By the second to fourth dec- ades of the twentieth century, however, an interest was flourishing which dated back to the studies of William H. Whitmore^ and Augustus Thorndike Perkins^* in the third quarter of the nineteenth, the seeking out and defining of the work of various artists active in colonial America, and the writing of their biographies. Lawrence Park tackled ^ William H. Whitmore, Notes Concerning Peter Pelkam, the Earliest Artist Resident in New England, and His Successors Prior to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1867). ' Augustus Thorndike Perkins, A Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the of John Singleton Copley (Boston, 1873). 20 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, Joseph Badger^ and Joseph Blackburn,^ Henry Wilder Eoote wrote of Robert Feke^ and joined John Hill Morgan in continuing Park's work on Blackburn, •* J. Hall Pleasants studied Justus Engelhardt Kühn,' and Barbara Neville Parker and Anne Boiling Wheeler produced their monu- mental catalogue of Copley's American portraits.^ The histories of portraits by unknown artists and the biog- raphies of the sitters were carefully studied to determine whether the portraits were actually painted in America. Much fundamental spadework was done by devoted ama- teurs but, whether by amateurs or professionals, it was done primarily by persons whose interest was in building the history of American painting by establishing the works produced in this country on which it could be based. Much of the research was carried out by men eminent in other professions, law, medicine, the ministry, and by staff mem- bers of historical societies and art museums. The careful examination of the pictures themselves, off the wall and in good light, by William Sawitzky, and in the laboratory with x-ray photography by Alan Burroughs, were further developments of this interest. So was a determined effort to uncover certain "fake" portraits (many of eminent men ornamented with Smibert signatures)® which had been con- cocted and accepted in the 'twenties. Colleges and univer- sities played virtually no part with the exception of Har- * Lawrence Park, Joseph Badger and a Descriptive List of Some of His Works (Boston, 1918). * lAwrence Park, "Joseph Blackburn—Portrait Painter," American Antiquarian So- ciety Proceedings, New Ser., XXXII (1922), 270-329. * Henry Wilder Foote, Robert Feke, Colonial Portrait Painter (Cambridge, Mass., 1930). 'John Hill Morgan and Henry Wilder Foote, "An Extension of Lawrence Park's Descriptive List of the Work of Joseph Blackburn," American Antiquarian Society Pro- ceedings, New Ser., XLVI (1936), 15-81. ' J. Hall Pleasants, "Justus Engelhardt Kühn, an Early Eighteenth Century Maryland Portrait Painter," American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, New Ser., XLVI (1936), 243-280. 8 Barbara Neville Parker and Anne Boiling Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, American Portraits (Boston, 1938). * Henry Wilder Foote, John Smibert, Painter (Cambridge, Masa., 1950), pp. 234-246. 1966.] BACKGROUND OF COLONIAL PORTRAITURE 21 vard's conservation laboratory and Yale, where John Mar- shall Phillips, Curator of the Garvan Collection, did not ignore American painting in his seminars on early American decorative arts. Yale has continued to lead the way and there, under the guidance of Jules D. Prown, a group of graduate stu- dents in the fine arts is addressing itself to the various problems in the field of early American painting. Prown himself has made a special study of Copley's English paint- ings which are included in his recently published catalogue of the artist's work.^"* He has spent much time in England for this purpose and his interest is indicative of one of the most important ways in which the study of colonial paint- ing has recently developed. A great desire has grown to know more of the careers of early American artists in Europe, of the years before the arrival of those not native- born, and, of those born in America, their periods of study abroad or of later work there. In a parallel development the frequently unresolved and detailed discussions of attribution which took place in the 'thirties and early 'forties gave way, after the second world war, to an entirely different concern which may be summed up in the inquiry, "What is American?" which was the title of a special issue of the periodical Art in America published in the fall of 1958. Touched off in 1945 by the exhibition entitled Old and New England organized by Gordon Washburn at the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design," sides were soon taken, some agreeing with Mr. Washburn's premise that early American painting has a distinct character of its own, others con- vinced that it was only a provincial off-shoot of English "Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 2 voU. ^* The Catalogue of Old and New England, an Exhibition of American Painting of Colonial and Early Republican Days together with English Painting of the same time.. .in the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, 1945). 22 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, and continental schools. Adherents of the latter idea claimed Mr. Washburn's exhibition achieved its effect by comparing American work with academic and sophisticated English painting whereas it should have been compared with provincial painting in England. To resolve the mat- ter it was obvious that students of American art should go to Europe to see for themselves. They did so and came back fortified with photographs and color slides, illustrated catalogues of English mansions open to the public, and many pages of notes. Because of the great interest in the question on the part of students here, they were barely off plane or boat before they were urged to report at seminars and in print.^^ To the amazement of those who had stayed at home, the travellers did not seem to have changed their previously held opinions. But, beneath the positions taken to make sensible talks, and the fun of comparing reproduc- tions of provincial European and American portraits, there was a feeling of frustration. I know, because I was one of the travellers. The task we had set ourselves was an im- possible one. We thought we could return with definite conclusions based on a thorough study of authentic exam- ples of provincial or untutored painting. As I look back on it now, we were surfeited with the watered down, wishy- washy, eighteenth century pictures (or copies after them) by fifth-rate hangers-on of the academic tradition with which one met in the back halls or lesser rooms of the great houses and which the English scholars thought we meant when we asked for guidance to where we could see simple portraits by minor artists. They thought we must be mad to be interested in what they rightly considered less than nothing. When we showed them photographs of Mrs. Freake " For example: Anna Wells Rutledge, "Fact and Fancy: Portraits from the Provinces," Antiques, LXXII (November, 1957), 446-448. I am grateful to Miss Rutledge for very helpful information and advice, especially in the early stages of my study. 1966.] BACKGROUND OF COLONIAL PORTRAITURE 23 and Baby Mary^^ and the little, paper doll-like portraits of the Gibbs children" of seventeenth century Boston; of Pau de Wandelaer,^^ a small bird perched on his hand and silhouetted against the forbidding further bank of the Hud- son River; or of the Reverend Ebenezer Devotion" by Winthrop Chandler, seated in his eighteenth century, Connecticut study before shelves of books all legibly let- tered, in a chair with every brass tack carefully depicted, they were enchanted. But they could suggest no English pictures remotely resembling the Wandelaer and Devotion portraits and, when they mentioned pictures comparable with the Gibbs and Freake likenesses of the 1670's, these turned out to be Stuart portraits of a generation or two earlier. By careful searching in museums, guildhalls, hos- pitals, educational institutions and private houses, some pictures emerged which seemed comparable with American work of roughly the same period but often these could only be seen hung high or in poor light and sometimes one could not be sure they were not later copies. Back- ground material on the pictures was very scanty. In fact the great difficulty was that, understandably, the basic study had not been done on these pictures to prove their status as genuine examples of seventeenth and eighteenth century work. If strong and simple primitive portraiture of this period exists in private possession it has not been lured into public view, as has been the case here, by en- thusiastic collectors, and dealers interested in supplying ^ Louisa Dresser, comp. and ed., XVIItk Century Painting in New England, a Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at tke Worcester Art Museum in Collaboration with the American Antiquarian Society, July and August, 1934, with a Laboratory Report by Alan Burroughs (Worcester, 1935), frontispiece; Worcester Art Museum, Nevis Bulletin and Calendar, XXIX, No.

Load more

  57

Copy Link