American genre painting and the rise of ‘average taste’

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 |

Nearly a century and a half after its publication in 1867, Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists is valued today mainly for its wealth of biographical data. But Tuckerman’s pronouncements summarizing the development of American art culture also deserve closer examination. Of particular interest is his reference to “average taste,” a descriptive he used to discuss the work of the genre specialist Francis William Edmonds. Looking back on the previous decades, Tuckerman credited Edmonds with popularizing “humorous every-day-life-scenes” whose “homely” subjects and “naïve literalness” appealed to “average taste.”1

Certainly today to have one’s taste (or art) described as “average” would not be a compliment. However, Tuckerman was well aware that such respected nineteenth-century collectors as Robert L. Stuart, Jonathan Sturges, Charles M. Leupp, and John Taylor Johnston avidly acquired works by Edmonds (for example, Bargaining, Fig. 7, purchased by Stuart in 1858), and he would not have used the word to disparage the taste of these powerful and wealthy men who were helping to shape a rich cul­tural life for the nation. Moreover, Edmonds’s art consistently garnered positive critical commentary throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the decades during which he frequently exhibited paintings at the Apollo Association (later the American Art-Union) and the National Academy of Design. What, then, did Tuckerman mean when he wrote about “average taste”? It is suggested here that it stemmed from several attitudes that converged in genre imagery that capitalized on the leavening effects of democracy as filtered through an evolving national his­tory, which, in this case, centered on the New York art community.

Fig. 2. Farmers Bargaining (later known as Bargaining for a Horse) by William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), 1835. Signed and dated “Wm. S. Mount/1835” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 24 by 30 inches. Except as noted, the works illustrat­ed are in the New-York Historical Society. Gift of the New-York Gal­lery of the Fine Arts.

Fig. 3. Peter Stuyvesant and the Trumpeter (also known as Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant on Learning the Capture, by Treachery, of Fort Casi­mir) by Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), 1835. Oil on canvas, 24 ¼ by 30 ¼ inches. Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts.

Fig. 4. Village Politicians by Abra­ham Raimbach (1776-1843) after Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841), 1813. Etching, 16 ½ by 22 inches (image). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue.

   Tuckerman saw Edmonds’s career as part of a transition he perceived in American art. As a man who made his living primar­ily as a banker but who also achieved professional status as an artist, Edmonds embodied the coming resolution of what Tuckerman described as the “war between utility and beauty, the ideal and the prac­tical.”2 That war was part of the then problematic state of the arts in the United States inasmuch as artists and writers, unified in their quest to cultivate a viable national culture, wrestled with conflicting desires to throw off the influence of the Old World, and yet claim and use those same traditions as a rightful heritage.

By the 1850s images of everyday American life were part of mainstream subject matter in art, made popular by Edmonds, and before him, William Sidney Mount (Fig. 2) and Asher B. Durand (Figs. 3, 5). At the beginning of their paint­ing careers both Mount and Durand had benefited from the patronage of another man of business and art, Luman Reed (1785-1836), whose life as a merchant and art collector also combined the “ideal and the practical.” Reed, who was an honor­ary member of the National Academy of Design, knew the academy’s first president, Samuel F. B. Morse, and was undoubtedly familiar with his hier­archically ordered analysis of artistic subject matter in which “Epic, Dramatic, and Historic” subjects occupied the uppermost rank and “Copies” the lowest.3 Morse’s subject categories echoed those promoted by painters affiliated with the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he had studied with the academy’s second president, American-born Benjamin West, whose paintings focused on the highest thematic content. Reed, however, rejected Morse’s hierarchy. Instead, as he confided to Mount, “Every day Scenes, where the picture tells the story are the kinds most pleasing to me and must be to every true lover of the art.”4

Mount, Durand, and Edmonds, whose genre paintings with contemporary settings and identifi­ably American narratives were instantly legible to the majority of viewers, were all recognized as fol­lowers of the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie. Beginning with the display of Village Politicians (see Fig. 4) in 1806, Wilkie had riveted London’s Royal Academy audiences with his innovative imagery featuring the lives of the rural poor. Like the three American artists who emulated his the­matic and formal tactics, he derived inspiration from such seventeenth-century Dutch masters as David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) and Adri­aen van Ostade (1610-1685).5 The transmission of this Dutch visual tradition via Wilkie’s imagery  to the developing art culture of the United States (mainly by means of prints) is well documented in art historical terms and was acknowledged widely by American critics throughout the 1830s and 1840s. However, factors other than artistic influence must be examined to explain why this particular mode took hold in the United States.6

The legacy of Dutch genre painting correspond­ed with the ideological aims of the new American nation in several ways. First, it was a visible re­minder of the young republic’s heritage inasmuch as New York was a Dutch colony until 1664.7 Thus, in adapting Dutch aesthetics to their particular thematic needs, American artists could justifiably claim that they were simply drawing from their own history rather than relying on the art of the European past. Moreover, there were social and economic parallels with Dutch precedents-par­ticularly with the mercantile patronage of the arts that developed in the seventeenth-century Neth­erlands, which signaled a break with older patterns of patronage dominated by church or royal author­ity. This break, too, had helped to rupture an aca­demic hierarchy of subject matter, one that smacked of imperial power and placed little value on scenes of common, con­temporary life. New Yorkers were especially mindful of their Dutch connections, a sensibility amplified by the 1809 publication of Wash­ington Irving’s satirical History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dy­nasty. Written under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving’s “history” proved so influential that the name Knickerbocker was claimed by early nineteenth-century New York authors, artists, publishers, and their friends to refer to their own cultural milieu.8 The effects of Knickerbocker culture were di­rectly manifested in the works of such artists as Durand (Fig. 3), Robert W. Weir (Fig. 6), and John Whetten Ehninger.

Fig. 5. The Pedlar by Durand, 1836. Oil on canvas, 24 by 34 ½ inches. Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts.

Fig. 6. Saint Nicholas by Rob­ert W. Weir (1803-1889), 1837-1838. Oil on wood pan­el, 30 by 24 ⅜ inches. Gift of George A. Zabriskie.

Fig. 7. Bargaining (later known as The Christmas Turkey) by Francis W. Ed­monds (1806-1863), c. 1858. Signed “F.W. Edmonds” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 16 ½ by 23 ⅜ inches. Robert L. Stuart CollectionFig. 8. Sunday Morning by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), 1866. Signed and dated E. Johnson/1866″ at lower right. Oil on canvas, 24 ¼ by 36 inches. Robert L. Stuart Collection.

Fig.9. Sibyl by Daniel Huntington (1816-1906), 1839. Oil on canvas, 30 ½ by 25 inches. Gift of the American Art-Union.

Fig. 10. Sowing the Word by Huntington, 1868. Signed and dated “D. Hunting­ton/1868” at lower right. Oil on linen, 44 ½ by 56 ¼ inches. Gift of the estate of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes.

    In broad terms, therefore, Dutch tradition lay at the foundation of New York’s burgeoning cultural at­mosphere in the 1820s and 1830s. And the men who promoted its development were, for the most part, from a plain, mercantile class that roughly equated with that of their Dutch predecessors. Their hopes for a strong national culture were fed by the belief that it was their duty to create a demand for the arts, a situa­tion they acknowledged was hampered initially by the new democracy’s need to deal with more pragmatic issues. Only after establish­ing a government supported by a thriving economy could the nation’s citizens begin to devote themselves to the fine arts, a pursuit that would signal the country’s attainment of a secure position among older civilized nations. A major component in reach­ing this goal was the Apollo Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States, founded in 1839, and later called the American Art-Union (AA-U) when it was reorganized in 1843.

In brief, the AA-U’s aims were to support American artists by purchasing their work and to whet the appetite of the general citizenry for art by offering the chance to win an original painting for the annual five dollar subscription price.9 In addition, prints after selected AA-U purchases would be distributed to all subscribers. What has not been fully explored, however, is that a sizable portion of the AA-U’s Committee of Management, which consisted mainly of NewYork businessmen, included collectors of contemporary American art. Of the fifteen men on the committee in 1844, Prosper M. Wetmore, Jonathan Sturges, Charles Leupp, Abraham M. Cozzens, John H. Gourlie, and John P. Ridner can be identified as such, a fact that not only underscores their belief in the country’s cultural future, but also highlights the likelihood that they could stand to gain consider­ably by using the AA-U to promote work by artists represented in their personal collections. Moreover, these men (like the Dutch before them) were members of a plutocracy, possessors of largely self-made fortunes who had achieved social and economic prominence.

Not surprisingly, the AA-U came under attack from artists who (with the major exception of Edmonds) were excluded from its admin­istrative ranks and from cultural idealists who complained that the orga­nization’s mode of distrib­uting art (essentially a lottery system) failed to cultivate genuine appre­ciation for art and, instead, encouraged mediocrity. As one writer put it, the or­ganization’s problems could be attributed to “the two or three uneducated trades­men, who have turned it into a hobby of personal consequence, and are building themselves a throne of patronage in its Committee-room, to which noth­ing but mediocrity in Art can long be humble enough to kneel.”10 In response to such accusations, the AA-U issued a rebuttal in its annual report of 1844, asserting that “any method which will enable the artist to find purchasers for his works, must be considered legitimate enough for him, at least; and will hardly be objected to by those into whose hands the works distributed by the Association may chance to fall.” Perhaps surprisingly, the report also justified distributing sometimes “mediocre” art: “Let us not, then, deny these simple delights to those who can enjoy them, lest we send them a work of art for their solace, which, tried by the highest standard of taste, may fall a trifle short of the highest excellence…. Before we can have good works of art, we must feel the need of them…. good taste is of all things the most gradual in its development, and of all pleasures it can with most propriety be said to grow by what it feeds on.”11 The paternalistic tone of the report implicitly admits the disparities in the artistic merit of the works offered by the AA-U, a situation underscored by one critic’s opinion that Daniel Huntington’s Sibyl (Fig. 9), an engraving of which was distributed in 1847, was held up as an antidote to the common or vulgar subjects depicted in other works purchased by the AA-U. 12

Essentially, there was a growing consensus that the potential for univer­sal appreciation of high art ex­isted in a democracy and could be achieved incrementally. Art commentators measured its advancement in the United States in terms of numbers, gauging improvement with increasing sales and exhibition attendance among the middle class. As readers were reminded in 1860, “Consider, too, the growing love for art in practical America; remark the crowds of newly rich who deck their houses with pictures and busts, even though they can not always appreciate them.”13 It was also thought that art could eradicate class bound­aries. As a writer for the Literary World observed, the viewers during the evening hours at the AA-U galleries included “every section of the social system.”14

In returning to Tuckerman’s “average taste” it is instructive to compare Eastman Johnson’s Sunday Morning (Fig. 8) and Huntington’s Sowing the Word (Fig. 10). Created within two years of each other, the works are vastly different in style yet convey essentially the same content-the reception given to the reading of Holy Scripture. Although some of Tuckerman’s contemporaries would have deemed Huntington’s painting superior to Johnson’s because of its timeless character and reliance on Italian Re­naissance sources, Johnson’s painting won out in terms of critical acclaim, market demand, and popular opinion. Its narrative of a post-Civil War family at private worship in a humble domestic set­ting is a tangible extension of the very aesthetic in Edmonds’s art that Tuckerman noted appealed to the “average taste.” Indeed, Johnson’s painting, by virtue of his four years of study in the Netherlands, is even more redolent of seventeenth-century Dutch precedents than any work by Edmonds. What may be deduced from this is that Tuckerman’s “war be­tween utility and beauty, the ideal and the practical” had subsided by 1867, inasmuch as what had been “average” was now considered above average. Perhaps not surprisingly, the collector Robert L. Stuart, who had acquired Edmonds’s Bargaining (Fig. 7), added Sunday Morning to his collection.

This article appears in conjunction with Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy, on view at the New-York Historical Society, November 11 to August 12, 2012.

1 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists. American Artist Life, Comprising Bi­ographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists: Preceded by an Historical Ac­count of the Rise and Progress of Art in America (New York, 1867), p. 411. Al­though generally reliable, Tuckerman was occasionally inaccurate, as here, where he refers to Edmonds as “John” rather than Francis William. It should be point­ed out that by including the words “Rise and Progress of Art” in the subtitle, Tuckerman clearly seems to have intended this volume to be the acknowledged successor to William Dunlap’s 1834 History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, recognized as the first survey of American art. 2 Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 413. 3 [Samuel F. B. Morse], “Review. The Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, 1827. The Second,” UnitedStates Review and Literary Gazette, vol. 2 (July 1827), pp. 241-263. 4 Reed to Mount, July 25, 1835, quoted in Alfred Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1975), p. 69. 5 See especially Catherine Hoover, “The Influence of David Wilkie’s Prints on the Genre Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 3 (Summer 1981), pp. 4-32; and H. Nichols B. Clark, “A Taste for the Netherlands: The Impact of Seven­teenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Genre Painting on American Art, 1800-1860,” ibid., vol. 14, no. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 23-38. 6 For an exemplary ex­amination of the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch art on the rise of genre painting in Britain, see David H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Moder­nity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-century Britain (Yale Uni­versity Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New Haven and London, 2008). 7 See Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped Amer­ica (Vintage Books, New York, 2005). 8 See James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1967). 9 See, for example, Rachel N. Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the Ameri­can Art-Union,” Journal of American History, vol. 81, no. 4 (March 1995), pp. 1534-1561; and Patricia Hills, “The American Art-Union as Patron for Expan­sionist Ideology in the 1840s,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850, ed. An­drew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge University Press, Cam­bridge, 1998), pp. 314-339. 10 “Crushing of the National Academy of Design and True Art by the Amateur Merchants of the Art-Union,” Home Journal, vol. 44, no. 194 (October 27, 1849), p. 2. 11 “Annual Report of the Committee of Management,” Transactions of the American Art-Union, 1844, pp. 5-6. 12 “The Art-Union Pictures,” Literary World, vol. 1 (October 23, 1847), p. 277. 13 “Rep­resentative Art,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 5 (June 1860), p. 689. 14 “The Art-Union and Its Friends,” Literary World, vol. 3 (November 25, 1848), pp. 852-853.

BARBARA DAYER GALLATI is curator emerita of American art, Brooklyn Museum, and lives in Bristol, England. She guest-curated Making American Taste and is the editor of the accompanying catalogue.

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