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Simply Art: Simply the best Simply Art Styles: 19th Century American Art  After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official
beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a
history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of
early American art from the late 18th century through the early 19th
century consists of history painting and portraits. Painters such as
Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials,
while John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic portraits for the
increasingly prosperous merchant class, and painters such as
John Trumbull were making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary
War.During the years before the Civil War American Landscape painters shifted from the Romantic tradition of Thomas Cole toward a more factual naturalism. America's first well-known school of painting, the Hudson River School, appeared in 1820. The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision depicted rural America, the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them.  The tension between an academic tradition imported from western Europe
and an unbroken American tradition of
realism marked the development of art in the United States during
the second half of the nineteenth century. The advocates of realism had
long considered it distinctly American and democratic; others in
contrast, saw the academic ideal as a link to a higher western European
culture. Artists such as
Winslow Homer believed that unadorned realism was an appropriate
style of art for democratic values in the post Civil War era. Many other
American artists turned their backs on modern reality and, like their
European Symbolist counterparts, escaped into the realms of myth,
fantasy, and imagination. Some artist were also attracted to traditional literary, historical and religious subjects, which they treated in unconventional ways to give them new meaning. Albert Pinkham Ryder has a classic example of this highly expressive interpretation in paintings. In "Jonah" (shown here) Ryder depicted the moment when the terrified Old Testament prophet, thrown overboard by his shipmates, was about to be consumed by a great fish. Appearing above in a blaze of holy light is God, shown as a bearded old man who holds the orb of divine power and makes a gesture of blessing. Albert Pinkham Ryder was a self taught American artist. Ryder was best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of color with tonalist works of the time, it was unique for accentuating form in a way that some art historians regard as modernist. Paintings of the Great West, particularly the act of conveying the sheer size of the land and the cultures of the native people living on it, were starting to emerge as well. Artists such as George Catlin (shown top of page) broke from traditional styles of showing land, most often done to show how much a subject owned, to show the West and it's people as honestly as possible. George Catlin is best known as a painter of the American Indians. After seeing a delegation of Plains Indians in Philadelphia, he decided to dedicate his life to recording the lives and customs of Native Americans. Soon after completing law school, Catlin became a professional artist. He traveled extensively throughout North America in the 1830s and he visited South America in the 1850s, painting hundreds of Indians and keeping detailed records of his journeys. |
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