Science & Arts

By ROBERT HUGHES

What sort of aesthetic air did Americans in 1787 breathe? A lot thinner than we probably think. Because the relics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are preserved in museums, we fall into the habit of thinking of the past as a museum, dense with artifacts, Chippendale and Copley everywhere, a colonial Williamsburg stretching from tidewater Virginia to the Long Wharf in Boston. Of course, neither life nor art was like that. To understand the culture of early republican America, one has to begin with a tiny society scattered along the eastern side of a continent no European had yet crossed, consisting of fewer than 4 million people. They were cut off from one another, from Europe and from the world, and communications over distance were so poor that the fact that the Revolution could have been organized at all was little less than a miracle.

These geographical conditions conspired to provincialize American culture. Today, no colonial weather vane or goffering iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made at elegance" and that it was difficult to find a workman who could draw a column correctly. "The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land," he wrote. "The first principles of the art are unknown, and there exists scarcely a model among us sufficiently chaste to give an idea of them."

There lay the nub. One learns to design by looking at real buildings, not pattern books, and in America models were rare. You could not bring a building across the Atlantic -- or not yet; that was within Hearst's power, not Jefferson's -- and great paintings generally did not cross because the American market for them in the 1780s was so small. But fine furniture and silverware could be imported and were, so that the work of early republican and federal craftsmen in America tends to be more sophisticated than most architecture of the day. Most of it was English, since America itself was mostly English. Just as American dissident patriots in the 1770s proudly claimed to be rebelling against George III in the name of the "true" British values of the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, so American craftsmen in the 18th and early 19th century appealed to British norms of design; there was not much talk about "American" culture, and to most people the idea would not have made sense.

Above all, the English prototypes were there to study, so that in the 18th century American furniture makers and metalworkers could achieve the freedom and finesse of detail, the robustness of design that come only from full historical awareness tempered by regional shop practice and local material. Thus they invented forms peculiar to America, like the deeply carved blockfront desk with shell motifs made by Townsend and Goddard in Newport, R.I. But American neoclassical "constitutional" furniture radiates a sense of lightness and straightforwardness; it rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic, mercantile temper. It spoke of royal courts. The desire for a general style that asserted first principles, tended toward abstraction and worshiped antiquity -- this mattered greatly to the young Republic in the 1780s.

In architecture, the style was set going by Jefferson, the father of American architectural thought (as distinct from mere building). His particular inspiration was one structure, a Roman temple known as the Maison Carree at Nimes in the south of France. All the architectural work he had admired during his years as American Minister to France from 1785-89 -- Pierre Rousseau's Hotel de Salm, the Pantheon, the mock ruins of the Desert de Retz, the designs of dead masters like Andrea Palladio and living architects like Etienne Louis Boullee and Claude Nicolas Ledoux -- would leave their traces in his own designs, but the Maison Carree was decisive for American architecture as a whole. By copying it, Jefferson felt, one could improve the Republic's general taste, "introducing into the State an example of architecture, in the classic style of antiquity." He used it (working from drawings) as the basis of the new Virginia state capitol in Richmond (1785-92). He visited Nimes in 1787 and contemplated its walls and portico, "gazing whole hours . . . like a lover at his mistress."

The Virginia state capitol became the model of federal official architecture -- the first pure temple-form public building of the neoclassical movement in the U.S. and Europe, predating French equivalents like the Madeleine in Paris by two decades. In a way, its radicality has been veiled by its success. Before long, America would be full of town halls, capitols and churches that looked like Roman temples, just as its map would be dotted with names from Greco-Roman antiquity: Ithaca, Rome, Athens, Sparta, Troy. But the Virginia state capitol was quite new and at the same time old; the strength of its political symbolism was meant to lie in its appeal to a precolonial past, that of the fresh Roman Republic, untainted as yet by Caesarism. Its model, said Jefferson, was the "best morsel of ancient architecture now remaining. It has obtained the approbation of fifteen or sixteen centuries, and is, therefore, preferable to any design which might be newly contrived."

It would be crude and misleading to say that Jefferson's ideas about building illustrate the ideas of the American Constitution. But they certainly grew from the same origin -- the secular humanism that, despite the gaudy bleatings of today's religious right, was their common moral root. Thus the calm, measured, lucid interior of Jefferson's Rotunda, the focus of his "academical village" (the University of Virginia), declares the value of reason and persuades us that humane analysis, not blind faith, is the true measure of a decent society. We sentimentalize Jefferson and his colleagues if we suppose they were not elitists. His buildings, like other major expressions of design in the new Republic, insist that elites matter and are valuable. They imply that the democratic task is not to level but to create space for the exceptional while protecting general access to it with doctrines of equal rights.

American neoclassicism was the style that marked the difference between the old regime and the new. When a cartoonist wanted to evoke the states of the embryo Republic, he drew them as classical columns standing together. The phrase the "federal pillars" was not just an empty cliche. Jefferson was not, of course, the only architect to act on such beliefs. In 1795 work began on Charles Bulfinch's new Massachusetts state house on Beacon Hill. The Old State House, built in 1712-13, had been the symbol of British power over Boston's economic life. Its site was tainted by the Boston Massacre. Its balcony signified rule by proclamation from on high.

Bulfinch set out to produce a building that declared "openness." The classical portico of the Massachusetts state house invites the citizen in, offering him rights of access to an assembly rather than treating him as a member of a colonized mob. It leads him to the chambers inside, where power operates by open consensus. Every line of this building is simple, masculine, direct -- the federal style in all its confidence. This exalted plainness of utterance would permeate crafts other than architecture; it was the general style of the early Republic. Cabinetmakers no less than builders now preferred explicit, abstract shapes: circle, ellipse, square. Deep carving and swag work became flattened and were replaced by abstractions of depth, mimicking light and shade in veneer. Back to basics: antiquity is destiny.

Is the idealist line as clear in early republican painting? Not quite, for artists took longer to develop their gifts, and painting, in any case, never seemed as good a political instrument to the Founding Fathers as architecture. Benjamin West (1738-1820), born in Springfield, Pa., to Quaker parents, was the first major American painter to make a career in Europe; he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. West might be known as the American Raphael, but this praise was as excessive as Lord Byron's dismissal of him: "the flattering, feeble dotard, West,/ Europe's worst dauber, and poor Britain's best . . ." He knew how to cater to Europeans' expectation that he, as an American, would be a cultural Natty Bumppo; when he went to Rome as a young man and was shown the Apollo Belvedere, the first nude sculpture he had ever seen, he endeared himself to connoisseurs by exclaiming, "My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!" Thus the white noble savage met the antique ideal, and West's name as a prodigy was made.

Like many American artists since, West came to believe in his own greatness too early. It gave him the self-confidence that turns to bombast. Much of his work is thin and overstretched. In the insecurities that underlay his rhetorical sweep, West remained somewhat provincial, but the big historical "machines" he painted for English clients partake of Jeffersonian ideas precisely because those ideas were also current in Europe -- particularly the notion that the morality of republican Rome, its emphasis on pietas, obligation and memory, plainness and bravery, could underwrite a new republican state.

A republican, in political terms, West was not. He was George III's favorite painter and, more than that, his personal friend, so much so that when the unpopular King contemplated going into exile in Germany in the early 1780s, the man he asked to go with him was West. The artist was painting the King's portrait at the moment a messenger arrived with the news of the Declaration of Independence. The unfolding of the Revolution caused him endless social difficulty, because the English and the American loyalist exiles in London suspected him of siding with the rebels. But still West's career was full of lessons for Americans artists coming up behind him: his desire for education, his often rather raw quoting of poses from classical statuary, his impulse toward deeper historical and allegorical meaning, took him far away from the provincial limner tradition in which he had grown up.

That tradition lived on in New England while West was in London, and it is hard to say whether its constrictions helped or hindered the growth of a better artist, John Singleton Copley, who left America on the eve of the Revolution, in 1774. "Was it not for preserving the resemblance of particular persons," Copley lamented, "painting would not be known in the place. The people generally regard it no more than any other useful trade." West, and Reynolds too, had been trying to persuade Copley to emigrate for nearly a decade, but his native timidity and self-doubt kept him at home. Perhaps this was lucky. Exposed to the full impact of London, the immature Copley might have turned into a second-rate Yankee Gainsborough. But in art-poor America this careful, empirical man had to concentrate on what was in front of him: the motif, not the mannerism. Cultural poverty kept him honest and helped him become the one unquestionably great realist painter America produced between the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and the emergence of Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia in the 1870s. A portrait like Copley's painting of Samuel Adams, in the act of urging the Royal Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts to redress citizens' grievances after the Boston Massacre in 1770, is a singularly vivid, even violent, image of political accusation.

In the level, rather flinty eyes of Copley's Boston Brahmins and New York merchants, one reads the practical gaze of a practical society. What am I looking at? How can I get straight to it? He rounds the contours of Paul Revere's skull with the same steady economy that Revere brought to the making of the silver teapot he holds. His sitters gesture curtly; they impress you with their self-containment. They look serious but not too grand. Copley could invest them with a splendid calm without falling into pomposity. In painting he searched for his own determined manner, the right epithet.

The problem arose, How could you have a secular museum of art, fit for the celebration of great men and stirring ideals, in a society that was too small to support museums? Philadelphia was the largest and most sophisticated city in America. It remained the center of American taste, the cultural capital of the new Republic, for half a century after the Revolution. But its population in 1787 was only about 40,000 people. Nevertheless, Philadelphia brought forth two important tendencies in the life of official American culture. One was the visual cult of the President as hero, not merely as citizen; the other was the birth of the American museum. Both owed much to Philadelphia's ornament -- Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), painter, curator, inventor, naturalist, propagandist and sire of America's first art dynasty.

Peale longed to be the official artist of the Revolution, the portraitist of its heroes -- especially of Washington, whom he painted over and over again with stiff, idolizing devotion for more than 20 years. It is a small example of the utter unfairness of art that for all his labors it was not Peale who created Washington's definitive icon for posterity but rather Gilbert Stuart -- a better artist but also a Tory who had cut and run for England when the cannons fired and only came back, as he put it, "to make a fortune by Washington alone; I calculate upon making a plurality of portraits." He did not die rich, but he was said to be able to whip off a Washington on demand in two hours flat. Stuart's diction was as fluent as Peale's was meticulous and creaky.

Stuart was not the only artist to profit from the emerging cult of Washington. After 1799, the imagery of the pater patriae as hero and then as demigod was being manufactured far and wide for the American market. Even Chinese painters produced touchingly naive apotheoses of Washington borne up ! to heaven on billowing clouds, rising through a shaft of light and surrounded with angels and grieving personifications of the young Republic, like a baroque saint.

As for Peale, his greater achievement was the invention of the first scientifically organized American museum open to the public on a continuous basis. His Peale's Museum in Philadelphia began modestly, with a few stuffed birds, and gradually expanded to include other "wonders" of science, nature and art, from a fossil mastodon to specimens brought back by Lewis and Clark from their trek across the continent, and a gallery of portraits of American heroes as well. He said he wanted "to bring into one view a world in miniature," and that was the gesture he painted himself making in 1822 at the entrance to the main hall of his museum: an aging man twitching aside the veil, raising the curtain on the world's collected knowledge. He was the first in a long and recognizably American line of pushy sages and didactic popularizers, which would run forward to people like Will and Ariel Durant and Mortimer Adler.

Neither Peale nor any other American painter of the late 18th century except Copley produced a masterpiece within his own field comparable to the architecture of Jefferson or to the legal and moral qualities of the Constitution. But by 1800 an answer to the haunting question posed by Michel- Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur -- "What then is the American, this new man?" -- was latent in the young Republic's art, and explicit in its architecture.