Periods in American Art

Native American

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, many native peoples populate North America. They speak countless languages and follow diverse patterns that are adapted to, and vary with, their environments. In some areas—such as the Northeast—they begin to group into more centralized political structures, while in the South, with the weakening of the important Mississippian centers, populations disperse into smaller communities. The arrival of Europeans at the end of the century, followed by the coming of fishermen, fur traders, gold seekers, and colonists, alters Native American lifeways forever. Contacts between Europeans and Native Americans increase during the following century, particularly in the Northeast, where trade expands and the arts of the region begin a period of integration of foreign elements into objects of everyday use. Such integration, in one measure or another, occurs throughout the continent, the specifics varying with time, place, and groups involved. New diseases, too, arrive with the Europeans, beginning a cycle of decimation that will last until the nineteenth century.

Colonial Period

Europeans colonize North America in the early seventeenth century, motivated by religious and economic goals. Spain and France, the two Catholic powers in Europe, lead the way, establishing Santa Fe and Québec as their colonial capitals in North America, but Protestant England soon follows along with other European nations such as Sweden and the DutchRepublic. Tens of thousands of English migrants settle along the Atlantic seaboard of North America between 1607 and 1675; they occupy lands previously the territory of Native Americans in three major regions known today as New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Chesapeake. The English bring distinct traditions across the Atlantic with them, but their experience in the coastal colonies pushes them into new modes of social life and material culture.
The first buildings in the colonies had irregular facades and were essentially postmedieval structures. These small houses often consisted of two simple rooms. The decoration of these rooms reflected the skill of the housewright, who embellished his labor—the house's primary structural timbers—with basic woodworking tools.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, colonial elites emerge in the maturing colonies; plantation owners in the South and the colonial merchants in the North stand out as leading patrons of the arts. New Georgian-style (a) mansions are replete with Rococo furniture forms(b). Immigrant portraitists seek commissions. The British colonies experience enormous population growth: the mainland colonies have about 400,000 residents in 1720 and nearly 2 million by 1765. A population explosion in Europe brings new waves of white migrants while the continued importation of enslaved Africans (c) increases the number of blacks. An expanding engagement with the British empire brings British manufactured goods, fostering a new identity as Britons. Wealthy Americans travel back seeking the cultural milieu of England and the Continent. However, those attachments and the British desire to raise revenues to finance the operations of the empire generate a crisis in the political relationship between the mother country and the colonists, one that eventually ignites a war for independence.
Georgian design, which was characterized by an adherence to theories of order, symmetry, and proportion drawn from classical models during the Renaissance, represented a significant departure from earlier English decorative traditions. It stressed the importance of an ordered facade and made extensive use of classical details like arches and columns copied from the antique. Marmion displays Palladian ideas in its symmetrical five-bay facade and highly decorative parlor.
Rococo is the name for one of the great international ornamental styles of the eighteenth century. In its departure from classical order and symmetry, the Rococo scorned the rule and the compass in favor of embellishment that required skillful freehand rendering and an imagination that transcended the bounds of academic convention. The emphasis was on naturalistic ornament, either carved or engraved. The style originated in Italy, flourished in France beginning in the 1730s, in England in the 1740s, and in America in the 1750s. The American adoption of the Rococo focused almost exclusively on the style's ornamental motifs—shells and rocailles, scrollwork, acanthus leaves, and other flora and fauna, often in symmetrical compositions. These were enthusiastically applied, by many leading urban craftsmen, to architectural interiors, engravings, silver, furniture, and other domestic equipage.
Ultimately, the international slave trade had lasting effects upon the African cultural landscape. Areas that were hit hardest by endemic warfare and slave raids suffered from general population decline, and it is believed that the shortage of men in particular may have changed the structure of many societies by thrusting women into roles previously occupied by their husbands and brothers. Additionally, some scholars have argued that images stemming from this era of constant violence and banditry have survived to the present day in the form of metaphysical fears and beliefs concerning witchcraft. In many cultures of West and Central Africa, witches are thought to kidnap solitary individuals to enslave or consume them. Finally, the increased exchange with Europeans and the fabulous wealth it brought enabled many states to cultivate sophisticated artistic traditions employing expensive and luxurious materials. From the fine silver- and goldwork of Dahomey and the Asante court to the virtuoso woodcarving of the Chokwe chiefdoms, these treasures are a vivid testimony of this turbulent period in African history.
After the American Revolution, a new federal government and federal culture emerge in the United States of America. An innovative arrangement of sharing power between the electorate, the states, and the national government is created with the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Despite the acclaimed selection of George Washington as the first president of the United States, political divisions remain between the northern and southern regions along with differing views of a strong central governmental authority. Political parties soon emerge over these conflicts, but other efforts focus on how to build a new nation. Patrons and artists also devise a distinctive nationalist culture around Neoclassical principles (a), looking to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome for inspiration for their new republic.
The Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand observation and reproduction of antique works and came to dominate European architecture, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. Travelers were also important students of Roman and Greek antiquity. In the early eighteenth century, painted visions of Greco-Roman monuments already could be found in continental palaces and English country homes. Soon, persons of culture and sensibility known to the Italians as cognoscenti were descending upon the peninsula to embark on the Grand Tour. The concept of ideal forms descended from Platonic texts and had been the theme of commentators since the Renaissance, but Winckelmann's proselytizing won new adherents. "The most eminent characteristic of Greek works," he wrote, "is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in gesture and expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures."These artists, together with Joseph-Marie Vien, Benjamin West (i), Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Angelica Kauffmann, made up the first generation of Neoclassical painters. They defined the style with their emphasis on formal composition, historic subject matter, contemporary settings and costumes, rigidity, solidity, and monumentality in the spirit of classical revival.
Benjamin West's influence on the course of American painting was enormous, and it is certain that without him the achievements of most of the major American artists of the time would not have been possible. Born on October 10, 1738, near Springfield, Pennsylvania, West manifested a talent for painting at an early age, and was encouraged to draw by his parents. By the age of fifteen he was something of a local celebrity for his portraits, and by 1756 he had attracted the attention of Dr. William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, who enrolled him in his school and devised a special program in classical learning for him. His lessons in antiquity fueled his determination to become a history painter, and in 1760 he sailed for Italy on a journey that would lead him to the pinnacle of artistic success.

The first American artist to study in Italy, West painted assiduously and embraced the embryonic Neoclassical movement then developing over all of Europe. He met the right people—the antiquities scholar Cardinal Albani, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, the historical genius Gavin Hamilton, among others—and, by the time he reached London in 1763, was steeped in the newest artistic trends. His ability, ambition, modernity, willingness to experiment, and social skills earned him widespread patronage. West met King George III, who appointed him a charter member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and by 1772 made him his historical painter.
West's position at the top of the hierarchy of British painters, once achieved through proximity to the king and his own grand historical tableau, was never in question. But although he painted competitively and successfully, his greatest studio productions were his many students. He fondly remembered his American upbringing and kept an open-door policy for American artists traveling abroad, providing them not only with a place to stay, but studio instruction, entrée into galleries and collections, and access to the RoyalAcademy. His first student was his friend Matthew Pratt, who came to London as an escort to West's fiancée Elizabeth Shewell. Pratt produced his now-famous conversation piece, The American School (97.29.3), both in homage to West and in order to make public his intention to achieve artistic independence: he portrayed himself as a painter in a studio of younger students still at their drawing boards.
The artists that followed in and out of West's studio comprise a who's who of American painting: Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, RalphEarl, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Samuel F. B. Morse, and many others. Peale arrived at West's studio in 1767 and remained for two years, primarily painting miniatures for his livelihood and admiring his master's grand-scale historical works, while eschewing the sophisticated painterliness of the English manner. Working together under West's tutelage, the extraordinarily talented painters Stuart and Trumbull alternately praised and ridiculed their teacher. Allston stayed but a moment, accepting West's hospitality as a means of grounding himself for subsequent studies in Italy. Sully and Morse caught West in his declining years, when as president of the Royal Academy he could offer his American students easy access to study at the schools and fatherly guidance toward the finest English artists of the day. Sully returned to America grateful to West, but painting in the manner of Sir Thomas Lawrence, and his colleague Morse took West's encouragement of his historical works to heart, never giving up his ambition to paint large, multifigure compositions even when forced into portraiture by the exigencies of the American nineteenth-century market.
West died in 1820, leaving a legacy not only of his own strong historical works, but perhaps more importantly, a following of painters who represented his training and counsel through the nineteenth century.

Post Revolutionary Period (1800-1870)

Important Events

Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 and the settlement of the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
Westward expansion fueled conflict with Native populations and led to their forced removal.
The regional cultures that had developed along the AtlanticCoast—New England, Middle Atlantic, Chesapeake, and Carolinas—were transplanted into the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the Old Southwest (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas). But although Americans had begun to identify themselves as a nation, they were divided by sectional interests that deepened with rapid industrialization and the question of slavery.
Americans steadily achieved economic independence from Europe. Industrialists remade rural villages into burgeoning factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, the center of cotton textile manufacture. However, many textiles continued to be made in individual households and small weaving workshops.
Government leaders and entrepreneurs campaigned for the construction of canals and railroads that helped create a vast national market. Robert Fulton's steamboat, the opening of trade to China in 1785, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825
The political calm that had characterized the first term of President George Washington (1732–1799) was soon disrupted by the rise of party conflict between the Federalists, the Republicans, and the eventual rise of the Democratic party (white male suffrage/Andrew Jackson)
Thomas Jefferson, War of 1812, Missouri Compromise
Foreign observers such as the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) remarked on the democratic character of American society, where families moved frequently and individuals were liberated from the restraints of tradition and hierarchy.

Artistic Trends

Many traditionally trained mechanics and other craftsmen who had expected to rise up the ladder from apprentice to journeyman, and then master, found their social position threatened by these developments. Furniture makers began to maintain well-stocked warehouses of Federal or Neoclassical furniture. Wealth no longer derived exclusively from landownership. Urban families with great fortunes from new sources-merchants, factory owners, financiers-patronized the workshops of urban cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and other skilled craftsmen.
Cultural independence proved harder to achieve. Despite the great focus on nature in American society, tastemakers continued to look abroad for classical and then revival styles (a). While folk painters (b) roamed rural areas to provide portraits for middling Americans, the European tour and grand historical themes remained critical to the work of academic painters and sculptors. At the same time, new cultural institutions on home soil provided opportunities for artists to study and exhibit. The artistic career of Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) is exemplary. He began as a rural portraitist, took the Grand Tour of European capitals and art collections, and, upon returning to New York, sought commissions for high-style portraits and historical studies. In 1825, he co-founded the National Academy of Design and served as its first president.
In reaction to rapid urbanization, the spread of manufacturing and mechanization, the massive influx of poor immigrants, and the Civil War, wealthy members of American society embraced Romanticism, the reigning philosophy of the day, which urged a reexamination of the "simple" ways of the past in order to find happiness in the more complicated present. The many revival styles generated by this sensibility, such as Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Egyptian Revival, Rococo Revival, Renaissance Revival, and Neo-Grec, were widely disseminated through pattern books and journals written for the cabinetmaker, builder, and general reader. Some of these revival styles were only found in furniture design, while others were used for a house's exterior and interior design as well.
Greek Revival architecture, especially popular in the 1820s and 1830s, spoke of patriotism and American optimism at a time when the democratic system of the young country. Gothic Revival houses were most often built in somewhat rural settings, and were prescribed for scholarly gentlemen and members of the clergy. Rococo Revival style, which was limited to interiors and furniture, was thought to be elegantly French, and was the most popular style for the design of drawing rooms or parlors (traditionally feminine rooms), no matter the exterior style of the house.
Many refer to folk art as plain, rural, provincial, outsider, idiosyncratic, or nonacademic—terms that are all marred by implications of condescension and inferiority. At the Metropolitan, we use the term "folk art" because it is traditional and recognizable, even if it does not begin to characterize the diversity of artistic approaches and expressions it purports to represent. No single term can meet that challenge.
Folk paintings are unified by conventions of method, aesthetics, and circumstance. The artists worked principally in the Northeast, away from urban centers; most spent their careers moving from place to place courting local audiences. Quite a few were highly trained ornamental painters. Almost all of them favored strong colors, broad and direct application of paint, patterned surfaces, generalized light, skewed scale and proportion, and conspicuous modeling. Most developed compositional formulas that allowed them to work quickly, with limited materials and in makeshift studios.
Portraiture was by far the most prevalent art form among itinerant painters in the American Northeast. These artists spent their careers on the road, seeking commissions. While most developed distinctive styles and artistic methods, all of their works betray the common circumstances of their nomadic production in rural America, and all are indebted in some measure to academic conventions. The poses, props, and settings for country portraits were no different from those employed by artists in the cities. These portraits, however, are restrained in every other respect. They are characterized by sharply defined forms, neatly organized compositions with clearly defined spatial arrangements, some with an almost mathematical precision and symmetry, generalized lighting, equal attention paid to all areas of the canvas, an absence of expressive brushwork, and an overall flatness and linearity.
The Hudson RiverSchool was America's first true artistic fraternity. Its name was coined to identify a group of New York City-based landscape painters that emerged about 1850 under the influence of the English émigré Thomas Cole (a) (1801–1848) and flourished until about the time of the Centennial. Because of the inspiration exerted by his work, Cole is usually regarded as the "father" or "founder" of the school, though he himself played no special organizational or fostering role except that he was the teacher of Frederic Edwin Church (b)(1826–1900). Along with Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Church was the most successful painter of the school until its decline. After Cole's death in 1848, his older contemporary Asher B. Durand (c) (1796–1886) became the acknowledged leader of the New York landscape painters.
From the start, Cole's style was marked by dramatic forms and vigorous technique, reflecting the British aesthetic theory of the Sublime, or fearsome, in nature. In the representation of American landscape, really in its infancy in the early nineteenth century, the application of the Sublime was virtually unprecedented, and moreover accorded with a growing appreciation of the wildness of native scenery that had not been seriously addressed by Cole's predecessors.
Church enjoyed the privilege and distinction of being Cole's student (1844–46), but supplanted his teacher's literary and historical conceits with scientific and expeditionary ones. Establishing his reputation with outsize depictions of North American scenic wonders such as Niagara Falls, Church was stirred by the travel accounts and scientific tracts of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to journey twice to South America in the 1850s and paint large-scale landscapes of the equatorial Andean regions that encompassed torrid to frigid habitats in a single picture—the Earth in microcosm
Church's only serious rival was Albert Bierstadt, an émigré who returned to his native Germany to study art at the DüsseldorfAcademy. In 1866, Bierstadt was among the earliest white visitors to Yosemite, and produced many large paintings of that region. He toured many times in the West, as well as in Canada, Alaska, Europe, and the Bahamas, and cultivated a large international clientele.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is regarded by many as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century. Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, he began his career as a commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in 1859. He briefly studied oil painting in the spring of 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the front in Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the new illustrated journal, Harper's Weekly. Homer's earliest Civil War paintings, dating from about 1863, are anecdotal, like his prints. As the war drew to a close, however, such canvases as The Veteran in a New Field and Prisoners from the Front reflect a more profound understanding of the war's impact and meaning. Women at leisure and children at play or simply preoccupied by their own concerns were regular subjects for the artist in the 1870s. In addition to expanding his mastery of oil paint during that decade, Homer began to create watercolors, and their success enabled him to give up his work as a freelance illustrator by 1875. He had been in Virginia during the war, and he returned there at least once during the mid-1870s, apparently to observe and portray what had happened to the lives of former slaves during the first decade of Emancipation.

Gilded Age (1870-1900)