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 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.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. |
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