What Kind of Art Did the Main Colonies Make

The Death of General Wolfe (1770)
By Benjamin West.
National Gallery of Art, Ottowa.

Development OF VISUAL Art
For a guide to fine art movements
and styles, see: History of Art.

American Colonial Fine art (c.1670-1800)

Contents

• Background History
• 17th Century Colonial Art
• Ethnic and Immigrant Painters
• Growth of Colonial Art and Compages
• The New American Democracy
• Artists of the Commonwealth
• John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)
• Benjamin West (1738-1820)
• Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)
• Portrait Miniatures
• Landscape Painting and Other Genres
• Architecture: Neoclassicism
• Furniture-Making and Other Crafts
• Collections
• Legacy

Portrait of George Washington
(The "Lansdowne" Portrait, 1796) By
Gilbert Stuart. Pennsylvania Academy.

American Indian Wood Etching
18th Century Tlingit Culture.

Colonial America: Background History

Due north America, with the temperate climate of the Eastern States so like that of Europe, seemed to the early settlers to be an unspoiled, undeveloped dwelling from dwelling - or even more, a potential new Garden of Eden. It attracted refugees and idealists from the very beginning of colonisation, who had hopes of founding a new life in a new country.

In the New England States kickoff Dutch, then English Protestant zealots attempted to set up a community under religious laws and the government of Puritan pastors, a theocracy. Further due south, in Virginia and Carolina the contrary happened. Hither it was Cavalier and Royalist refugees who tried to rebuild an aristocratic mode of life on estates and plantations, where they imitated the life-style of English land gentlemen. Both Puritans and Cavaliers were to see their ethics founder under the bear upon of reality, simply each form of idealism produced its ain types of art, architecture, music and literature. Conflicting idealism besides inspired and divided the politics of the new Democracy, eventually leading to the War between the States (1861-v) and a subsequent new due west migration. As long as North American civilisation was centred on the Eastern States, its practitioners would look back to Europe. Information technology was the American West, and contact with both Nature and the inhabitants in that location, particularly the old Spanish colonists, that finally liberated American fine art from provinciality. It was as if a wave of energy reached the West Coast, then broke and rolled dorsum to rejuvenate the Due east.

Colonial versus Native Art
In general, the term "American Colonial fine art" describes the fine art and architecture of 17th and 18th century settlers who arrived in America from Europe. It was and so Eurocentric that information technology had no contact with the tribal art traditions of American Indian art, either on the eastern seaboard, the plains or the w declension. For more almost art from other British colonies, see: Australian Colonial Painting (1780-1880).

American Colonial Art of the Seventeenth Century

The 17th century saw the get-go concerted and successful attempts by Europeans to settle in the The states, only the problems and time-consuming difficulties of creating new communities in a new world did not exit the settlers much leisure or energy to devote to the visual arts. Nevertheless, by the 2nd one-half of the 17th century a tradition of native American painting was developed by the practical artisan artists who gathered in the metropolitan centres of New York and Boston - a tradition based on portrait fine art and figurative compositions. The Self-Portrait by Helm Thomas Smith (1690, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts) and the Portrait of Margaret Gibbs of (1670, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) testify the mixture of styles from Europe that was to exist basic to the evolution of American painting. The pictorial realism of Dutch Bizarre fine art is married to such traditional European conventions every bit the open window in the corner of the Thomas Smith portrait, adding an idea of space.

Most 17th-century American portraitists relied on engraving European originals to provide them with the basic structural framework for their portraits, too equally ideas of limerick, poses, and details of wearing apparel. Often only the heads were taken from life. These mainly bearding artist-copiers did not receive positive encouragement from American puritans as there was, stemming from religious behavior, a general disapproval of visual images. Religious revelation was to come up through the written scriptures, not through allegorical imagery. The only area of visual expression officially excluded from this general prohibition were the gravestone carvings where images of life and expiry, strength and fortitude were symbolised in statue and relief sculpture.

However at that place were other outlets for pictorial expression and a vigorous vernacular tradition of decorative fine art flourished in the course of heraldic devices, inn and shop signs, charabanc and furniture ornamentation. Non all the American puritans were dour religious zealots dressed in blackness. The colourful portraits of Mrs Elizabeth Freake and Infant Mary (c.1674, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts) reveals a growing informal worldliness in American portraiture. The portrait was commissioned past her husband John Freake, a Boston attorney, merchant, and shipowner, to demonstrate his social condition. With the increasing wealth of the American colonies, American artists by the terminate of the 17th century began to find more patrons like John Freake. By 1690 Boston was a flourishing port of 7,000 inhabitants and the thriving communities of New York and Philadelphia both numbered iv,000. These metropolitan centres of industry and commerce created the conditions for a more stable arrangement of art patronage.

Ethnic and Immigrant Painters

The second flow of American colonial fine art is characterised by two principal features, first the establishment of a native group of artisan artists, and secondly the influence of visiting artists from Europe commissioned by some wealthy Americans to stay with and paint their families. The native American artists, though all the same copying European models, gave their paintings a strong individualism indicated by severe lines and box-like proportions within the painting. The Portrait of Ebenezer Devotion (1770, Lyman Allyn Art Museum) by Winthrop Chandler (1747-1790), used a background of books both to symbolise learning and to provide a strong element of design. These artisan artists advertised a variety of services for the community - drinking glass-painting, gilding, as well as portraiture. They occupy a middle group between fine and applied fine art that has been a stiff and feature feature of American culture.

The visiting artists from Europe included the pastelist, Henrietta Johnston (Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston) (c.1674–1729), a French Huguenot who produced a large number of frail, tinted oval portraits. Painting in the manner of Sir Godfrey Kneller, she painted numerous portraits of Huguenot families including the Bacots, Prioleaus and du Boses - see her works in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York State Museum, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, and the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Other immigrant painters featured the Swedish-built-in painter Gustavus Hesselius (1682-1755) who settled in Philadelphia in 1712, and Charles Bridges (c.1672–1747) who arrived in Virginia in 1735 and painted the Byrd family, too as the Bolling, Blair, Custis, Carter, Grymes, Ludwell, Lee, Moore, Folio, Randolph and other southern families, returning to England in 1744. In Charleston, the leading portraitist was the Swiss-born painter Jeremiah Theus (1716-74), whose works include Lt. Col. Barnard Elliott (1740, Gibbes Museum of Art), Elizabeth Prioleau Roupell (1753, Loftier Museum of Fine art) and the miniature Mrs. Jacob Motte (Rebecca Brewton) (1758, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Another of the most accomplished immigrant painters was the Scottish-American artist John Smibert (or Smybert) (1688-1751), who in 1728 crossed the Atlantic equally the Professor of Fine art and Architecture attached to Bishop Berkeley'south visionary projection to found a college for the education and conversion of Indians in Bermuda. The project failed but Smibert settled in Boston in 1730 and created a studio total of European paintings which became a mecca for time to come American artists such as Copley, Charles Peale and Trumbull. The unsuccessful Bermuda project was the origin for Smibert'due south nearly famous American painting The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage) (1728-39, Yale University Fine art Gallery), which depicts Berkeley and his associates. This item oil painting set up a style for group portraits in America, combining elements of Baroque painting in straight imitation of Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723). In America the social image of the sitter was of prime importance to bespeak social status. Virtually wealthy Americans of this era wanted to add an aristocratic bearing and life style to their merchant or land-owning abundance. In New York a group of artists known as the 'patroon' painters flourished in this genre of status painting betwixt 1715 and 1730. Other important portrait painters of this era were Robert Feke (1706-50), Joseph Badger (1708-65), and John Wollaston (active in America 1749-58).

Growth of Colonial Art and Compages

The process of colonisation involved several distinctive European cultures. On the far west coast of California was Spanish Roman Cosmic Baroque, in Canada and Louisana were the French of Louis Fourteen and Fifteen, and on the east declension were the Dutch and English.

The latter were to be the strongest and most lasting influence. Two singled-out streams of English settlers were seeking their ain version of a 'Garden of Eden' in the New World. In New England, along the coast and upwardly the Hudson River Valley the Puritans hoped to build a pious theocratic state free from persecution and based on their own fundamental religious principles. Further southward, in Virginia, were settlers expecting to atomic number 82 the life of rich English gentlemen on plantations and estates, in almost complete opposition to the ideals of their Puritan neighbours. All looked dorsum to the Old World for their compages and culture. The Puritans built sober Anglo-Dutch houses and churches in neat little towns. The Virginians looked to the courtroom of Charles II and built in the manner of Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723).

Many of these types of colonial architecture would be revived by designers during the 19th century and the early 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), for case, designed Bagley Firm (1894) in a Dutch Colonial Revival mode; Moore Firm I (1895), in a Tudor Revival style; and Charles Roberts House (1896), in a Queen Anne fashion.

In the South, large plantation homes overflowed with American and European article of furniture, paintings and items of ceramic fine art, like fine English earthenware and Chinese porcelain. Charleston in Due south Carolina, presently became the most prosperous and largest metropolis in the Southward as well as the foremost port and trading heart for the southern colonies. Numerous French Protestant Huguenot refugees settled in Charleston, building a series of magnificent townhouses along the harbor's edge. The South's wealthy plantation owners and merchants summoned private tutors from Britain to teach their children, or else despatched their sons to schools in England. Amazingly, Charlestonians comprised the single largest grouping of Americans to take the M Tour of Europe - a yr-long sightseeing and cultural trip through Renaissance Italian republic and Bourbon France.

In the north, the urban center of Boston also expanded in both population and affluence. By most 1755, 1 in three of all British ships were built in New England, and American colonists were conducting maritime commerce with Africa, Asia, the Due west Indies, and Due south America, also as Europe. Philadelphia was some other thriving business centre of the north, and the heart of its fine article of furniture industry. Indeed, by about 1760, Philadelphia had overtaken Boston to get the richest and biggest of all colonial American cities.

Meanwhile, disharmonize was approaching. War between England and France spread across the Atlantic to the colonies. Although the English language gained command of Canada and much of the eastern United States, they decided to maintain a permanent garrison. To pay for this they imposed a series of taxes during the period 1764-1767, including The Sugar Act, the Postage stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts. This led to a cold-shoulder motion, followed by mass political protest, followed by the Revolutionary War of Independence.

The New American Republic

The next generation of American painters coincided with the formation of a Republic, which was politically independent of the British crown. This emerging confidence can be seen in the piece of work of the ii major artists of the menstruum, both born in 1738, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West. These two artists extended the range of bailiwick matter in American painting to include historical, mythological and landscape subjects also as the traditional portrait. Copley'south aspirations and attitude to the role of the painter in the colonies can be seen in his own remark: "was it not for preserving the resemblance of item persons, painting would not be known in the place. The people regard it as no more than whatever other useful trade ... like that of a carpenter, tailor, or shoemaker, not as one of the about noble arts in the world". Both artists realised their ambitions to raise the condition of the artist in America. Benjamin West moved to Europe in 1760, eventually becoming President of the Royal University in 1792. Copley remained in America until 1774, becoming the foremost portraitist in New England.

Artists of the Republic

John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)

The American painting career of John Singleton Copley, as part of Boston's elite, exhibits 2 of the fundamental characteristics of American painting in this era: technical virtuosity and the ability to localise and particularise the uplifting sentiments that painters in the 18th century were expected to transmit through their paintings.

In 1748, Copley's mother had married the English-born American limner and mezzotint engraver Peter Pelham (1695-1751) - whose portrait paintings included those of Queen Anne, George I, the Earl of Derby, and Lord Wilmington - and whose Boston workshop chop-chop became one of the centres for Bostonian artists. Through this family unit connectedness Copley was trained in the figurative realism of the colonial limners only he increasingly infused his portraits with patriotic sentiments as in his famous Portrait of Paul Revere (1768, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Paul Revere, a Republican patriot, had led the protest against the Postage Human activity of 1765. He was a highly skilled silversmith and the portrait conveys the informal autonomous nobility of the shirt-sleeved craftsman, teapot in manus, an image that relates to the rise of national pride in the increasingly assertive American colonies.

Copley, however, did not distinguish between the politics of his sitters and he painted many Bostonians who remained loyal to the Crown. He was also a master of pastel portraiture, having become aware of the advances fabricated by the Swiss creative person Jean-Etienne Liotard, and completed a number of pastel drawings marked by their accurate rendering of the sitter's fashion, as well every bit their delineation of their grapheme. Such was the esteem in which Copley's pastel portraits were held, that the New York Metropolitan Museum purchased his portrait of Mrs. Edward Light-green well in advance of the more famous oil portraits for which he is more widely known.

On moving to England in 1774, Copley added history painting to his repertoire, depicting a number of heroic incidents from British history, including The Expiry of Chatha in the House of Lords (1779), The Expiry of Major Pearson (in a skirmish with the French in the Channel Islands) (1782), and The Siege of Gibraltar (1791). This combination of the selection of an incident from contemporary history married to a manner of meticulous realism was novel. Copley ever preferred to paint gimmicky historical subjects, proverb, "I take as much equally possible employed myself in events that have happened in my own life time". His major painting of 1778, Watson and the Shark (National Gallery of Fine art, Washington DC), exhibits many of these features. Watson, a friend of Copley, told him of a youthful encounter with a shark in Havana Harbour. The linear flow of waves, ships, and the naked Watson is opposed past the strong vertical of the crewman attempting to spear the shark. Copley dramatises a existent-life incident of natural take a chance allowing the subject thing to make up one's mind the manner: the waterfront characters are not given mythological significance in the Neoclassical style.

Benjamin Westward (1738-1820)

From his position as a major effigy in both British and American painting, Benjamin Due west became a focal betoken for American artists who increasingly came to Europe to make their grand European tours. West was more consciously heroic in his style, simply like Copley firmly believed in choosing subject area matter from contemporary events, for his history painting. Due west's composition Treaty of William Penn with the Indians (1771, Pennsylvania State Museum) shows the grave Quakers making a solemn treaty with the native chieftains, investing the scene with all the stoic dignity of an event from Greek or Roman political history. In 1772 West became George 3'southward Royal Painter of history pieces. Due west's subjects ranged beyond a wide field, Biblical, Shakespearean, historical and Classical themes, and he actively encouraged American painters to extend their range.

Ane of his pupils was John Trumbull (1736-1843), who in 1786 embarked on a series of paintings which would commemorate the events that led to the independence of the American colonies. These include The Boxing of Bunker'south Loma (1784, Yale University Art Gallery) and General George Washington before the Boxing of Trenton (1792, Yale University Art Gallery), paintings which develop the tradition of history painting established by West and Copley, adding Trumbull's own qualities of flowing movement and softened outlines. A reproduction of his painting Annunciation of Independence (1818, United States Capitol Rotunda, Washington DC) appeared on the opposite of the United States two-dollar bill. Trumbull likewise painted numerous portraits, including those of General Washington (1790) and George Clinton (1791), as well as Alexander Hamilton (1805). Other followers of West full-bodied on detail types of flick, such as however lifes and genre painting.

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)

Gilbert Stuart was another eminent portrait painter of the time, responsible for the portraits of over 1,000 people, including the first 6 Presidents of the U.s.a.. Among his finest works is the unfinished portrait of George Washington, known every bit "The Athenaeum", which withal appears on the United States 1 dollar beak; the "Lansdowne Portrait" (1796), and The Skater (1782, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) is also famous for his portraits of leading figures of the American Revolution. His most celebrated work is George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (1781, Yale Academy Art Gallery) - which sold in Jan 2005 for $21.three million dollars: and then a record for an American portrait. He also painted portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton equally well as more than than sixty portraits of George Washington. In addition, he equanimous eyewitness paintings of American scientific wonders. Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806-8, Peale Museum, Baltimore) was exhibited in Peale's famous museum of natural wonders in Philadelphia.

Portrait Miniatures

Miniature Painting (Portrait Miniatures) in America, derived from the works of the High german expatriate Hans Holbein (1497-1543) and Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1616), with due thank you to the revolutionary watercolour innovations of the Venetian miniaturist, Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757). In Boston, Copley was the first to master this specialist genre (Portrait of Jeremiah Lee, 1769); while in Philadelphia, leading miniaturists included Charles Wilson Peale and James Peale (1749-1831) (also known for his still lifes). In Charleston, the superlative man was the Philadephian Henry Benbridge (1743-1812), noted for his full-length works like Dr. Jonathan Potts (1776, Fine art Institute of Chicago) also equally his watercolour miniatures on ivory; while in New York, it was the goldsmith and miniaturist John Ramage (1748-1802) - who produced pocket-sized-scale pictures of numerous politicians including the first American president, George Washington.

Landscape Painting and Othe Genres

Figure painting and portraiture in oils and pastels was the most important 18th-century forms of draftsmanship good in the cities of colonial America. But in the countryside other forms were likewise seen, including pen-and-ink drawings, oft by anonymous artists but occasionally by known figures, such equally Johann Heinrich Otto (c.1773-1800), creator of the Fraktur Motifs, noted for its bright swirling patterns of flowers, crowns, peacocks and parrots. Landscape painting, almost unheard of before 1800, arrived in the form of topographical watercolour painting. The primary exponents in New York City was the Scottish-born painter Alexander Robertson (1772–1841) and his brother Archibald Robertson (1765–1835), founders of the metropolis'south get-go fine art school, the Columbia University.

Architecture: Neoclassicism

Republicans in Europe looked back nostalgically to the Roman Republic as an egalitarian ideal; a myth largely of their own making. Neoclassical Architecture was the recognisable symbol of the Republican spirit, not the theatrically golden and mirrored Baroque architecture that Renaissance Classical had become, but a chaste, pure and conspicuously defined Classical mode, equally idealistic and begetting as little relation to its origins as the politics information technology symbolised. The white or foam painted neo-Palladian house was the American ideal. The defeat of the British was also a defeat for the old Puritan ascendancy, although non seen as such at the time, and the early days of the Democracy saw its political domination by Southern landowners rather than Northern merchants. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), legislator, economist, educationalist and Tertiary President of the U.s.a., was a professional and influential builder. The son of a surveyor, he built his mansion dwelling, Monticello, in 1769 on his inherited estate. He too designed the Virginian Country Capitol Building, the Washington Capitol, burnt in 1817, and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the prototypical American campus. Influenced by Andrea Palladio (1508-80), Jefferson plant in Roman Classicism authority for social and architectural theories suitable for a new Democracy. In addition to Jefferson, colonial American architects who used neoclassical designs included Federal Mode designers William Thornton (1759-1828) and Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), who designed about of the United states of america Capitol Edifice (1792-1827), also every bit the Greek Revival architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820), who was likewise responsible for the Baltimore Basilica (1806–1821). For more details, run across: American Compages (1600-present).

Furniture-Making and Other Crafts

During the 18th century, the demand for fine furniture to decorate plantation mansions and respectable town houses had created a new grade of artisans and main craftsmen skilled in forest-carving and carpentry. One of the top native-built-in cabinetmakers was John Townsend of Newport, Rhode Isle (1733–1809). He was built-in in Newport, Rhode Island, second just to Boston among the cities of New England, whose prosperous furniture industry was controlled by two intermarried Quaker families, the Townsends and the Goddards. Throughout the industrious north, in Newport, Boston and Philadelphia, Philadelphia, artisan Cabinetmakers - many of whom were London-trained emigrants - created masterpieces in the Rococo mode styled on images independent in imported pattern books. Meanwhile, in the countryside, traditional German designs remained popular.

Other popular crafts in rural areas of the colonies included: embroidery, handbasket-weaving, metalwork, jewellery and (in the northeast seaports) whalebone and ivory carving, likewise equally different types of folk art such equally doll-making, quilt-making and coating-making. Notwithstanding, all these crafts autumn outside the general category of art, although they served a vital role in colonial culture.

Collections

Examples of American Colonial fine art can be seen in many of the best art museums and heritage centres across the United states of america, including the post-obit venues:

- American Folk Art Museum (NYC)
- Art Found of Chicago, Illinois
- Boston Museum of Fine Arts
- Denver Art Museum, Colorado
- Detroit Plant of Arts, Michigan
- Gibbes Museum of Art
- Greenville County Museum of Art
- Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth)
- Lyman Allyn Art Museum
- Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC)
- Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), Minnesota
- Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
- National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
- National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC
- New York State Museum
- Peale Museum, Baltimore
- Pennsylvania State Museum
- Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Smithsonian American Fine art Museum, Washington DC
- Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts
- Yale University Art Gallery

Legacy of Colonial Art

American 19th century artists congenital upon the traditions and standards prepare by Copley, West and Gilbert - not just in portraiture and historical works but also in the newly popular genre of landscape. Thus, equally Colonial fine art gave way to the more bodacious traditions of the 19th century, the eastern cities began to feel the sights of the American wilderness through the optics of the Missouri borderland painter George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879); the Hudson River painters Thomas Cole (1801-48) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900); and the leader of the Rocky Mountain school, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). They experienced the Cowboy West through the paintings of Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and the sculpture of James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) - see, for instance, his masterpiece The End of the Trail (1915, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City). Meanwhile, the genre of American history painting was maintained by the German-American painter Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-68) who is renowned for his canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Fine art).

• For a chronological guide to painting in colonial era America and elsewhere, see: History of Art Timeline.
• For information virtually neoclassical colonial architecture in the United States, see: Homepage.

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