Patrick Bade
The Birth of American Painting: 1776-1860’s

Patrick Bade - The Birth of American Painting: 1776-1860’s

- Thank you, thank you. Well as you can see, I’m neither in my Paris flat, nor my London flat. Trudy has very kindly allowed me to come to her flat, where she has a better internet connection. And I do hope that by the next time I talk to you, which is in a week’s time, I will have a new, more effective internet server. So this is my first contribution to our new series on America, and I’m looking at the origins of American painting. And on the screen you can see two self-portraits by Benjamin West, who was the first American-born painter to gain an international reputation, and the first to make a significant contribution to the Western art tradition. He was born in 1738 in Springfield, Pennsylvania. And his great contribution, it was actually an important one, was the invention of an entirely new genre of painting, genre means a category, in this sense. And, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in the past, that in the 18th century there was a hierarchy of genres, with history paintings at the top that was the most admired form of painting, large-scale paintings with nude or draped figures, with great historical or moral themes. And below that were different genres, portraiture, genre of painting with a small G, meaning a painting of everyday life, and animal painting, still life, and all that kind of thing. But, so this new genre was modern history painting, so, Benjamin West was taking events from modern history and painting on a huge and heroic and an idealized scale, his first really important attempt at this kind of thing was The Death of General Wolfe, in the taking of the heights of Quebec during the Seven Years’ War, so, there are several versions of this painting.

There’s a smaller one in the National Gallery in London, but I think there’s a bigger one in, I’m not sure if it’s in America or Canada actually. And so he’s showing the death of General Wolfe in a very heroic way. He’s, you know, surrounded by his soldiers who are tending him as he dies. And we see a Native American, also depicted in a very idealized way, looking like a sort of classical statute, looking very, very sculptural. And he’s done something, as far as I know, he’s the very first artist to attempt to do this, but many artists did it afterwards. He’s drawing on Christian iconography to raise the whole tone of the thing. This would’ve been quite shocking, I think, for somebody like Sir Joshua Reynolds, that he’s painting what Reynolds would see as a genre subject, a subject from everyday life, even if it’s a rather dramatic one, and painting it in this heroic and idealized way. And the positioning of General Wolfe, and the way he’s surrounded, was intended to, that people should recall depictions of Christ taken down from the cross, and the entombment of Christ, and the insert there shows that. So this new type of painting became very, very important in the early years of the 19th century, and the great figure, the great romantic artists like Delacroix, Gericault, Goya, they all attempted modern history paintings. This is perhaps the greatest of them all. The Goya Third of May, showing French soldiers massacring the civilian population of Goya after an uprising against the French occupation, in 1808. And you see that Goya is actually doing the same, he’s taken a leaf out of Benjamin West’s book, by playing upon visual reminiscences of Christian iconography, that the central figure with the white shirt, his arms are stretched out, and I think that’s meant to give you a kind of subliminal memory of the crucifixion. And here is another very famous modern history painting by Delacroix. This is Liberty Leading the People, of 1830.

Now he was obviously precociously talented, and he was only 17 years old when he painted this picture, which is of his uncle, a man called Guy Johnson, who was the British Superintendent of Indian affairs in pre-Revolutionary America. And he attracted the attention of wealthy patrons, and they clubbed together to get the money to send Benjamin West to Rome. If you remember, if you heard my last lecture, I was talking about Liotard and Fuseli, both of whom went to Rome, this was the goal of every ambitious aspiring artist in the 18th century. Not only to study the art of the antique, and the Renaissance, but also for networking, you know, this is where you were likely to make influential and useful contacts. He arrived in Rome in 1760. And it was a very auspicious moment. It was a moment where there were very profound changes in the art scene. The reaction against the Baroque, and the Rococo, and the birth of the new Neoclassical style. And the prophet, the great prophet of Neoclassicism was the German art historian Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who you see on the left hand side. And five years earlier, in 1755, he had published a very influential essay, called Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art. And in that essay he said, we can only become great again if we look back to the ancient Greeks and we learn from them. The painting on the right hand side is a slightly cruel joke that was played on Winckelmann by one of his proteges, a German artist called Anton Raphael Mengs, who was trying to put Winckelmann’s ideas into practice. Well Winckelmann was always saying, of course, we have Greek sculpture, if only we had Greek painting, Greek painting will be much more beautiful, much more wonderful, than anything from the Renaissance or since.

So Anton Raphael Mengs faked a Greek fresca, which he claimed to have discovered. And the slight cruelty of the joke is that the subject, of course, is a homoerotic one, it’s Zeus with his male cupbearer, Ganymede, kissing his cupbearer, and he knew that this was, because of Winckelmann’s homosexual interests, that this might be a way of getting past his critical faculties, and it worked a treat. Winckelmann exclaimed that the picture was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, and far greater than Rafael and Michelangelo and so on. And then Anton Raphael Mengs said, “Ha ha ha, I painted it.” So this is a painting that Benjamin West created in Rome in the 1760s in this new neoclassical style, where we’ve got a shallow space, with the figures splayed out across the shallow space, almost like a kind of relief sculpture, of course it is very influenced by relief sculpture, by Greek vase painting. A very defined silhouettes, a very sculptural treatment of the drapery, which hangs on the bodies, and defines the bodies underneath the drapery. So it’s a rather severe style. And so, many artists in the circle of Winckelmann, from all over Europe, particularly Northern Europe, were painting in this style. This is a contemporary painting, by a French artist, where you can see the obvious similarities, the way the space is defined, almost like in a early renaissance painting, the figures being on what looks like a giant chessboard, and the shallow space limited by a wall that’s parallel to the picture’s surface, and so on, you can see a lot of stylistic similarities.

So another rather interesting modern history painting, of course it was not exactly contemporary, it shows an event of a generation earlier. And this shows William Penn making a treaty with the local Native Americans in Pennsylvania when he arrived there, and this was actually commissioned by a descendant of William Penn. And, you know, I presume, there is some degree of authenticity in the costume of the Native Americans, I’m sure there are people out there listening to this who will know better than me about that. Incidentally, when Benjamin West arrived in Rome, he was introduced to a cardinal, who was very disappointed to find that he was dressed in Western clothing, he expected him to be dressed in feathers as he came from America. This is, as you can see, an unfinished painting. Unfinished paintings are always very interesting ‘cause they show you the way that an artist work. And I’m sure many of you recognize Benjamin Franklin, left of center of this composition. And it’s a very interesting painting from a historical point of view, 'cause it records the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Treaty of Paris was the war that ended the American War of Independence. Now from a British point of view, of course, that was actually pretty well a world war, with Britain fighting just about everybody else. I think it was, you know, after the Seven Years’ War, in which Britain had roundly defeated France and snatched Canada, and India, and become very much the top dog in Europe, and I think other European nations resented this hegemony that the British had achieved through the Seven Years’ War.

So when the Americans revolted against the English in 1776, pretty well every nation in Europe turned on Britain, of course, the American War of Independence was very, very much, the Americans were very, very much helped by the French, in fact, to an extent that almost bankrupted France, and was one of the factors that led to the French Revolution. Two portraits of Benjamin Franklin, the one on the left hand side, made from life, in the 1780s. And the one on the right hand side, it’s a more allegorical picture, showing Benjamin Franklin drawing electricity from the skies. Now, we move on to my second artist, which is John Singleton Copley, who’s actually born the same year, 1738, but he has a longer career in America, I mean Benjamin West never went back again. Course it would’ve been a huge undertaking to cross the Atlantic to go back. So, yeah, John Singleton Copley, well he followed in his footsteps, but some years later, coming to Rome and coming to Europe, and this is his self-portrait. My feeling is that he is a more accomplished artist technically. I mean, this has very fine painterly qualities. And a kind of freshness and a kind of spontaneity, that sets him apart, I would say, from Benjamin West. But I particularly love the portraits that he made in America before he left Europe. These have a kind of crispness and a certain naive truthfulness. I mean, this is, I’m going to be talking about this again, talking about 19th century American art. There is a quality, it’s hard to find, that seems to me an American quality of truthfulness, we see it again in the work of Winslow Homer and Eakins, and through into figurative artists, American artists of the 20th century like Edward Hopper. So that is that kind of directness, that kind of truthfulness, that kind of honesty, seems to me to be an American quality, of course, we’ve seen certain notorious American figures recently who are not particularly noted for their truthfulness.

But I would like to say that aesthetically, this seems to me to be, this kind of honesty and truthfulness, seems to be, to me, to be an American quality. And as we see in this very delightful portrait of a young boy with his pet squirrel. And actually I see a certain connection with Liotard, who I was talking about last time, in that it’s a very straightforward, unsentimental depiction of a child. In fact, I would say, of course, Liotard has something of the same quality of directness and truthfulness. This is probably Copley’s most famous American portrait of the silversmith, Paul Revere, who famously galloped through the night saying “The British are coming.” Played an important role in the American Revolution. And again, a portrait of great historical interest, this is Sam Adams, who’s one of the founding fathers of the American Constitution. Again, a portrait that Copley painted before leaving what was then the United States for Europe. So, following the example of Benjamin West, Copley also tries his hands at modern history painting. This painting is entitled Watson and the Shark. And it records an actual event, although an event that had taken several years earlier, in the harbor of Havana. Copeley himself had never been to Havana, so he had to paint this picture from other people’s descriptions, perhaps from printed images, of a harbor of Havana. And it was the victim himself, a man who lost a leg to a shark, who commissioned this very dramatic modern history scene. This is his largest and most ambitious modern history painting, this is in the Tate Gallery in London. And it’s The Death of Major Peirson, this dates from 1781. And it records an incident that was in the news at the time, when there was a French incursion, an attack on the British island of Jersey, just off the Normandy coast. And in that attack, the heroic Major Peirson was killed. And you can see him also following Benjamin West’s example in using reminiscences of Christian iconography. This relaxed pose of the dead or dying Major Peirson being supported by the figures, is very much like the kind of pose you find in images of the deposition or the entombment of Christ. And so, I mean, he’s always a very, very accomplished artist.

And very, very skillful. And his style changes when he comes to England, it loses that that slightly naive quality which is so attractive in his American portraits, becomes much more suave, much more sophisticated, as you can see in this portrait of William Fitch and his sisters, dating from 1800. And this is, I think, a very beautiful, very moving portrait, of an African, possibly a slave or a freed slave. And I think it’s interesting, I’m sure there’ve been many shows, probably in America, devoted to this. But how, from the 17th century onwards, portraits by white European artists of Africans, or Asians, for that matter, often have a kind of, again, truthfulness, I would say, and a human quality. I think it’s partly because, when they’re looking at this person, just as a human creature, a human being, he’s not needing to give you his social status, as he would do, if it were a commissioned portrait of a fellow European. Now moving on to, for the rest of this talk, mainly talking about landscape painters. Of course, in this period, America is expanding westwards, throughout the 19th century, at vast, vast expanses. And so, in the first half, well, you can say, between the 1840s and the 1870s, American artists are trying to come to grips with the sheer vastness of the country, and with its incredibly dramatic and varied landscape. Now landscape painting in Europe, of course there was some landscape painting in the ancient world, but it’s something that begins to redevelop again in the 15th century, both in northern Europe and in Italy, not independently, but as the background for religious paintings. So this is Piero della Francesca, The Baptism, which you can find in the National Gallery in London. And it shows a very characteristic Tuscan landscape in the background. And this is Hugo van der Goes, the Adoration of the Magi. Of course he’s a Flemish artist, and he’s painting a winter landscape, with the trees without any leaves.

But he lives in northern Europe, he has no idea what the landscape is like in the Middle East. And he gives us a very faithful and convincing rendition of his local landscape. Now the very first school of painting to produce landscapes characteristic of their countryside, rather surprisingly, was the Dutch. I say surprisingly, ‘cause obviously, Dutch landscape is probably the flattest and the dullest in Europe. But it’s in the course of the 17th century that we have fully independent landscapes, landscapes that are not just the background to either a religious scene or a mythological scene. And artists really trying to capture the specific qualities of Dutch landscape, this is Philips Koninck, who’s particularly known for these flat, everlasting landscapes. So the Dutch are the first, and they are followed by the British in the 18th century, this is Richard Wilson, who’s actually Welsh, and who breaks with the idealized landscape of Claude, for instance, and tries to capture, again, the specific qualities of his native Wales. So this is Thomas Cole. And this brings me to the Hudson River School. And this is a group of artists who are trying to give you a truly and authentically American landscape. His dates are 1801 to 1848, so he dies relatively young. and in fact he’s not a native American, well, he’s certainly not a native, he’s not a born American, he was actually born in Britain. And went to United States as a young man in 1818. And then returned again to Europe from 1829 to '32, to study as an artist. And we can see here, that he’s very aware of John Constable. The insert here is Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, painted in 1828. So it’s very likely that Thomas Cole, arriving in London in 1829 would’ve seen this painting at the Royal Academy.

Well I think you can, the influence on his painting, the larger one here, is very self-evident. Now, this is one of his most famous paintings, the Voyage of Life. And in fact, when I did my final edit of this talk last night, I was going through the PowerPoint, I actually cut it out. And then I received an email today, from Leslie Cohen, in Washington. And she said, “Oh, I’m so happy "you’re showing this painting, I love this painting "and I want to hear what you’re going to say about it,” so, rather shamefacedly, I put it back in again. And I have to say, one reason I cut it out was, well, two reasons. One was I don’t actually really have a lot to say about it. And secondly, it doesn’t quite fit into my narrative of what American artists were trying to do in this period, which is to give you a truthful image of American landscape, 'cause this clearly isn’t. This is an allegorical picture. And obviously with a religious context, with this angel in the boat. But here I think he’s less influenced by Constable, 'cause Constable is another artist who’s aiming for truth, to give you, you know, the truth of the English landscape. I think he’s more influenced by the much more fantastic and theatrical art of Turner, particularly the extraordinary luminosity of Turner’s landscape, so here, this is Thomas Cole bottom left, And Turner top right. So, this is really what he is more famous for, perhaps it’s rather more, you know, however lovely The Voyage of Life may be. This is The Oxbow painted in 1836, and a very important painting for the development of American landscape, in that it is a topographically recognizable landscape, and he’s really trying to give you the, there’s a certain artifice, I think, in the placing of the tree as a framing motif on the left hand side, but otherwise, this is, I think, a pretty faithful transcription. Now, as I said, he died in 1848. And his friend Asher Durand, born 1796, so in fact a couple of years older, died 1886. He painted this picture the following year, as a kind of memorial to his friendship with Thomas Cole.

The title, this is a very famous painting for Americans, of course, and it’s entitled Kindred Spirits. And so it’s meant to give you this sense of the vastness, the power, the wonder of nature, these two small figures standing rather precariously on this rocky outcrop. And this has, for me, a very German romantic quality to it. On the right hand side, this, well of course we’re a very romantic with a capital R, romanticism with a new attitude to nature, at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, the concept of the sublime, that is, and you know, suddenly, as I said, oh, of course you didn’t get most of that lecture, when I was talking about the way Switzerland’s image changed, in the Romantic period, with suddenly mountains being very attractive and people wanting to go to mountains, wanting to climb mountains for the view, and thrilling to the awesome power of nature, the sublime, which is a sense of beauty with an element of terror in it. And one of the most famous expressions of that is in Byron’s poem, Manfred. And there’s a scene where he’s on the Jungfrau, teaching on the brink of a precipice and thrilling to the vastness of the mountain landscape. But maybe it’s rather closer to Asher Durand, is this painting by Caspar David Friedrich. All these artists, Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, later Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, they’re very religious as Casper David Friedrich was, and as Constable was, actually. And they see, they’re kind of pantheistic, they see God in nature. And so this is Casper David Friedrich with this rather bourgeois man, kind of quite smartly, respectably dressed, as Asher Durand and Thomas Cole are on the left hand side, really in a state of, I think, religious contemplation of the vastness and the beauty of nature. And so this is, as I said, this America is moving westwards, in these years.

And this is another very famous painting by Asher Durand, the title is The First Harvest in the Wilderness with settlers, European settlers’ cottages, in the vastness of the wilderness. So now I move on to Frederic Edwin Church. He is often described, he and Bierstadt are described as second generation Hudson School. And they’re also sometimes described as luminous, ‘cause of their interest in light, transcendental light. This is his first hugely successful painting, and a painting which has become very famous, of course, of Niagara Falls. And so if there’s one piece of scenery in all America, which seems to embody the vastness and the power of the American landscape, it is of course Niagara Falls. And if you read 19th century or early 20th century autobiographies of, I’ve read huge numbers of autobiographies of singers, for instance, the musicians who went to America. And going to Niagara Falls was obligatory. And they all write, Lotte Lehmann, in her autobiography, for instance, Frida Leider, they all write these incredibly, literally gushing descriptions of how powerful and wonderful Niagara Falls was. And it gives them the sense of the vastness and power of the American continent. And Sarah Bernhardt went there, in fact she published a whole little book about her adventures, going out on very tricky, dangerous precipices, to thrill to the power of the water coming over the falls. It’s only Oscar Wilde, of course, rather cheekily, after Niagara Falls became the most popular honeymoon resort in America, he famously described it as “The second great disappointment "of every American marriage.” So, Frederic Edwin Church was immensely successful and popular, in the, shall we say the 1860s and '70s, painting absolutely enormous pictures, I think it’s quite significant here too, that it has such an elongated format.

And it’s been commented by a number of art historians that this is a feature of a lot of American painting. I mean, through, of course, into the 1940s and '50s, with abstract expressionism, often paintings on a vast scale, with this elongated format that again gives a sense of the sheer vastness of America. So another artist who is plainly very, very religious, very spiritual, and seeing God in nature. And I wonder if he could have come across the work of Casper David Friedrich, who was a sort of a forgotten figure, by the middle of the 19th century. But there is obviously a very striking similarity, in the imagery of these two paintings. And it’s Church, top left, and Casper David Friedrich, bottom right. And he did travel to Europe, as we shall see in a minute. But I think his best work was of the Americas, he was a great traveler. Went down to Mexico, right up to Alaska, so he certainly traveled the length and breadth of the Americas. This is a painting entitled Among the Sierra Nevada, it dates from 1868. Extremely theatrical. No it does look, it’s kind of operatic really, isn’t it, or cinematic, maybe cinematic is better, or it looks like, you know, the wide screen technicolor imagery of films of the 1950s. Of course it’s very, very artificial. And in fact it’s no surprise, really. Although it contains apparently very, very scientifically correct observations, like the particular form of the double rainbow and so on. And all the plants and the trees and so on are actually botanically correct. But the overall effect of it, of course, is very artificial. And it’s no surprise that it wasn’t painted in America at all. It was actually painted in a studio in Rome. So, the public loved these pictures. And sometimes they, rather like a movie, they would be privately exhibited, and people would be charged to come and see them. This is of, course, extremely spectacular picture, called The Icebergs, which he made going up into the Arctic Circle. Some of the same things about this, of course, the strongly elongated format, and the striking theatricality of it all.

But he did travel to Europe. And this is a painting he made of the Aegean, you can see he loves these double rainbows. Again, very, very striking. And this is his painting of the Parthenon. And so, very successful in the earlier part of his career, enough so that he was able to build this spectacular house at Olana, in a kind of new version style. But he lived, well I suppose he outlived his time, you have to say. 'Cause he lived a long time, born in 1826, to 1900. So, certainly from the 1880s onwards, he was very going very out of fashion. There was a big pendulum swinging against this. Next week when we get to Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, of course, that is a radically different direction. And these huge theatrical things fell out of favor. And he was actually more or less a forgotten figure, until well into the 20th century, when his reputation was revived. And the same is true for this artist, a close contemporary, this is Albert Bierstadt. He was born in Germany in 1830, and as a small child, emigrated to America. But when he studied as an artist, he actually came back to Europe, to study in Dusseldorf. And so Dusseldorf rivaled Paris, as a Mecca for aspiring artists, the School of Dusseldorf was very, very important. And I would say that until the 1860s, the main influences on American painting were either British or they were German. All that changes in the 1860s when Paris becomes the focus as we shall see next week, both Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins went to Paris rather than to Dusseldorf. So, Bierstadt goes back to America. And he becomes the great chronicler of the move through the Rockies to the west coast of America. This is Mount Corcoran.

And he, again, there’s a lot in common with Frederic Church, the interest in dramatic light, and the impossibly theatrical drama of these absolutely huge cinematic paintings. And, so, again, all of these pictures of the Rocky Mountains by Albert Bierstadt, another artist, I mean, he also was very long lived, died in 1902, and after initial popular success, fell out of fashion in the later part of his life. Now, the last artist I’m going to talk about is probably my favorite of all these artists that I’m talking about tonight. And this is George Caleb Bingham. He’s born in 1811, dies in 1879, two self-portraits of him, and a photograph in the middle there. And he’s born in Missouri. and he in fact was quite strongly involved in local politics, and was a great campaigner against slavery. And he played an important role, particularly in the Civil War period, in mobilizing Missouri on the unionist side against the slave-owning South. And he is, if Albert Bierstadt is the poet of the Rockies, Bingham, George Caleb Bingham, is the poet of the Mississippi, this is perhaps his most famous picture of fur traders on the Mississippi. An enchanting picture, so poetic, with a certain naivety. And to me, his paintings have a very Biedermeier quality. When he painted these pictures, he had never been to Europe, and probably didn’t know any German or Danish Biedermeier painters. So it’s something, I suppose it’s a question of zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, rather than direct influence, but this for instance is Kobke, Christen Kobke is a Danish artist, just a bit older. But the same kind of crisp, slightly naive truthfulness that you find in George Caleb Bingham. And so these are really, I think, his best pictures of the river life of the Mississippi. And very simple, ordinary people. Slightly anecdotal, you could say. But very delightful pictures. And I think this is it. I don’t think I have more to tell you, so I’ll see what questions and comments that are.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you Rita.

Q: “Would Goya have seen Benjamin West’s work?”

A: It’s possible that Goya would’ve known, Goya was very keen on English prints, he collected them. And it’s quite likely, I think, that Goya would’ve seen prints after the death of General Wolfe, so yes, I think that is quite likely.

Q: When am I going to display Indigenous Indian art?

A: Well, it won’t be me, 'cause I don’t know enough about it. It would be very good to have a lecture on that, maybe I’ll suggest that to Trudy. She’ll have to find somebody else to do it, 'cause I simply don’t know enough about it.

“It’s a chipmunk, not a squirrel,” thank you. “Chipmunks aren’t gray, they’re yellowish gold,” so we’ve got a dispute going here.

“Niagara Falls painting captures the falls "on the Canadian side.”

This is Ron. There was a Thomas Cole exhibition at the Met before lockdown, and you caught a smaller version of it at the National Gallery in London. It emphasized Cole’s fear, in the first half of the 19th century, that environment would be corrupted by the machine age, well that was a very prophetic thing to feel so far back then. Extremely far-sighted, as you say, and unfortunately true.

“The elongated format had an incarnation "in the format of CinemaScope in the 1950s.” Spot on, exactly, that is very true.

And this is Martin, who’s actually seen a circular rainbow like that.

Thank you Rita. I always appreciate your very kind comments.

“None of those dramatic landscapes look real.” Yes, that is very true.

Q: “Why did they paint like that?”

A: Well they were very popular, as I said, I think they painted that because the public really liked it. And remember, you know, at this time, most people hadn’t traveled, and photography was in its infancy and was black and white. So, I imagine that most of the people who thrilled to these landscapes had no idea, of course, how fake they were, that the reality was not like that.

Q: Thank you Sharon. “Any comments on Samuel Morse, other than the telegraph?”

A: No, I don’t think I have.

Max, it’s not me that’s resurrecting Thomas Cole, I think he’s been resurrected for some time.

And Caroline, you like my choice of… Yes, of all the painters I’ve shown you tonight, I think the only ones I’ve really, really like to own, and have perhaps not in my Paris flat, more of my London house, I would love to have George Caleb Bingham, but maybe a poster will do, or a postcard will do instead.

Thank you all very, very much, and I’m moving on to realism next week, so it’s another one of those great, as I said, one of those great pendulum swings, from the artifice, and the artificiality, and the romanticism we’ve been looking at tonight, to something, a much more earthy and truculent kind of realism. So that’s it, thank you very much, bye-bye.