Westward the course of Empire takes its way,
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.8
With Berkeley’s poem reprinted in virtually every American newspaper and many magazines over the succeeding decades, more and more Americans became convinced that the arts were about to move from Western Europe to America, there to thrive as never before.9 As early as 1759 the unsympathetic British traveler Andrew Burnaby noted that the colonists were “looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the rest of the world.”10
So common became this theme of the translatio studii to eighteenth-century Americans that it led to the emergence of a new literary genre, the Rising Glory of America poem, which, it seems, every gentleman with literary aspirations tried his hand at. The most famous work with that title, “The Rising Glory of America,” was Philip Freneau’s and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1771 Princeton commencement poem. In it they predicted that Americans would in time have not only their own states, “not less in fame than Greece and Rome of old,” but their own Homers and Miltons too. The poet John Trumbull echoed the same theme in predicting that painters, architects, musicians, and writers must inevitably find their place in this free and uncorrupted country:
This Land her Steele and Addison shall view,
The former glories equal’d by the new;
Some future Shakespeare charm’d the rising age,
And hold in magic chains the listening stage.11
Of course, not every American intellectual was sure of the New World’s ability as yet to receive the inherited torch of Western culture, and some doubted whether America’s primitive tastes could ever sustain the fine arts. Yet nearly all who became committed to the Revolution found themselves embracing a vision of America’s becoming not only a libertarian refuge from the world’s tyranny but also a worthy place where, in the words of Ezra Stiles, the enlightened president of Yale, “all the arts may be transported from Europe and Asia and flourish with . . . an augmented lustre.”12
THE REVOLUTIONARIES, OF COURSE, never saw these dreams realized. Indeed, the gap between what they hoped for and what actually happened in the arts was so great that many historians have never been able to take their dreams seriously. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss their hopes of America’s becoming the eventual repository of Western learning as empty bluster. Not only did the Americans mean what they said, but their earnest attempts to implement that meaning had profound effects on American culture. By conceiving themselves as receiving and fulfilling the westward movement of the arts, the Revolutionaries inevitably became involved in powerful currents of cultural change sweeping through Europe in the eighteenth century.
A century later these European currents would be labeled neoclassicism and disparaged as cold, formal, and sterile.13 Yet to those who participated in this eighteenth-century artistic transformation, including Americans, neoclassicism represented not just another stylistic phase in the development of Western art but the ultimate realization of artistic truth, a promise of a new kind of enlightened art for an enlightened world. From the early eighteenth century, in France and England especially, amateur theorists had worked to distinguish several of the arts—usually painting, architecture, music, and poetry—from other arts and crafts and had designated them as possessing special capacities for civilizing humans. Numerous treatises systematically combined these “fine arts” together because of the presumed similarity of effect they had on audiences, spectators, and readers. Out of such efforts not only was the modern conception of aesthetics created, but the idea of measuring and judging nations and peoples by their artistic tastes and contributions was also born. These eighteenth-century developments radically transformed the aesthetic and social meaning of art. Paintings and literature were being taken out of the hands of the aristocratic courts and narrow elites and were being made into public commodities distributed to all literate members of the society eager to acquire reputations for polish and refinement.14
There were two interrelated aspects of this neoclassical transformation of the arts. One involved the purposes of art; the other involved a broadening of its public. For too long too many of the arts, such as the rococo paintings of François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, seemed to have been the exclusive preserve of courtiers and a leisured aristocracy. Devotees of the rococo style, it was thought, looked upon the arts as a means of private pleasure, amusement, and display, as diversions from ennui or instruments of court intrigue. Such frivolous arts could scarcely be paid any special public veneration; indeed, with the courtly emphasis on amorous dalliance, lasciviousness, and luxury the arts could only be considered sources of personal corruption, effeminacy, and decadence, and hence dangerous to the social order.
Americans knew only too well that the fine arts, like painting or sculpture, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “flourish chiefly in wealthy and luxurious countries” and therefore were symptoms of social decadence. Throughout his life, John Adams always had an extraordinarily sensuous attraction to beauty and the world of art. When he joined the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, he entered his first Roman Catholic church and, accustomed as he was to the stark simplicity of the Puritan churches of Massachusetts, was overwhelmed by the pomp of the service and the richness of the ornamentation. “Here is every Thing,” he told his wife Abigail, “which can lay hold of the Eye, Ear, and Imagination.” When he went to France in 1778 he was even more enchanted and overwhelmed by the beauty of Paris and Versailles, where “the Richness, the Magnificence, and Splendor is beyond all Description.” Yet he knew that such art and beauty were the products of a hierarchical church and an authoritarian monarchy. As a good republican he knew “that the more elegance, the less virtue, in all times and countries.” Buildings, paintings, sculpture, music, gardens, and furniture—however rich, magnificent, and splendid—were simply “bagatelles introduced by time and luxury in change for the great qualities and hardy, manly virtues of the human heart.” The arts, he said, could “inform the Understanding, or refine the Taste,” yet at the same time they could also “seduce, betray, deceive, deprave, corrupt, and debauch.”15
Since the arts were associated with the politeness and gentility that many eighteenth-century people, including many Americans, were eager to acquire, they became a serious problem for enlightened reformers. How could the arts be promoted without promoting their evil consequences?
The solution was to change the character and purpose of art. Since those who feared being corrupted assumed that the arts, particularly the visual arts, had powerful effects on their beholder, it took only a slight shift of emphasis to transform art from a corrupting instrument of pleasure into a beneficial instrument of instruction. By the middle of the eighteenth-century European and English philosophers were already redirecting the content and form of art away from frivolous and voluptuous private pleasure toward moral education and civic ennoblement. Infused with dignity and morality and made subservient to some ideological force outside themselves, the arts could become something more than charming ornaments of an idle aristocracy; they could become public agents of reformation and refinement for the whole society.
At the same time as the social purpose of art was transformed, the patronage of art expanded from the court and a few great noblemen to embrace the entire educated public. Indeed, the two developments reinforced one another. Cultivation in the arts became a central means by which eighteenth-century gentlemen sought to distinguish themselves. Wealth and blood were no longer sufficient; taste and an awareness of the arts were now necessary. Indeed, the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury declared that morality and good taste were allied: “the science of virtuosi and that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same.”16 Politeness and refinement were connected with public morality and social order. The spread of good taste throughout t
he society would make for a better and more benevolent nation.
Through the multiplication of newspapers, magazines, circulating libraries, and book clubs, through the public exhibitions of paintings and the engraving and distribution of prints, and through the formation of salons, subscription assemblies, and concert halls—through all these means Englishmen and other Europeans sought to exploit the arts in order to reform their societies. In the process they turned the arts into culture, into commodities, and created a central characteristic of modern life. The polite essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, the satiric prints of William Hogarth, the history paintings of Benjamin West, even the vases of Josiah Wedgwood, all in their different ways expressed this new moral and social conception of culture. All were efforts to meet the new desire of a public eager to learn how to behave, what to value, and why to be refined. To possess this culture—to have correct taste and an amateur knowledge of the arts and sciences—was to be a truly enlightened gentleman.
The effects of these developments on the arts and society were enormous. The arts became objects of special knowledge and examination, to be placed in museums and studied in academies. Enlightened writers and painters sought to embody new ethical qualities in their work—truth, purity, nobility, honesty—to counteract the licentiousness and frivolity of their predecessors. The artist was no longer a craftsman catering to a few aristocratic patrons; he was to become a public philosopher academically educated and speaking to the society-at-large. Just as enlightened scientists and statesmen were seeking to discover the universal verities that underlay the workings of the universe and political states, so too were artists urged to return to long-accepted standards of excellence and virtue for the sake of the moral improvement of humanity.
For most eighteenth-century philosophes the return to the first principles of truth and beauty meant a recovery of antiquity. The only way for the moderns to become great, declared the influential German theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755, Eng. trans. 1765), was “by imitating the ancients.” For Winckelmann and other neoclassicists, originality meant little more than a return to origins.17 Although Westerners, including the North American colonists, had long been involved with antiquity, the new enlightened interest in politeness and civic morality coupled with the archaeological discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the middle of the eighteenth century gave the classical past a new relevance, especially for those eager to emphasize republican values. The American Revolutionaries, in their images and writings, began playing down the martial qualities of antiquity and stressing instead its contributions to civility and sociability.18
Yet this new neoclassical use of antiquity was only the means toward a higher end—the discovery and imitation of Nature or those permanent and universal principles that transcended time, locality, and particularity. For Jefferson “natural” meant ideal, which is why he favored a “natural” aristocracy over an “artificial” one that was based on blood and family. Neoclassical art thus became a hostage against decline, a way of freezing time and maintaining an ideal permanence amidst the inevitability of social decay.
Comte de Volney’s Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolution of Empires was immensely popular in the United States—selling more than forty thousand copies within a few years of its publication in an English translation in 1795. Jefferson was so entranced by it that he began a new American translation, which he passed on to Joel Barlow to complete and publish in Paris in 1802. In addition to its anti-religious message and its indictment of monarchical tyranny and its celebration of liberty and equality, the book brought home to enlightened Americans the mortality of all states and reinforced their desire to build in stone and marble and to create depositories in order to leave to the future durable monuments of America’s cultivation and refinement. But the book also seemed to suggest that an uncorrupted republican government might evade the decline and decay that had beset all other governments.19
EVEN PRIOR TO THE REVOLUTION some colonial painters had aspired to making their art significant. One of the early patrons of Benjamin West in Pennsylvania had told him to forget portraits and devote himself to “illustrating the moral effect of the art of painting.”20 West went to Europe and never returned, becoming in time president of Britain’s Royal Academy and painter to George III. In a like manner John S. Copley of colonial Boston had yearned to make painting “one of the most noble arts in the world.” But he could not convince his fellow colonial Americans to have anything other than their portraits painted. In fact, they regarded him as a mere artisan and what he did as just another “trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a carpenter, tailor, or shew-maker.” In frustration Copley left for England in 1774—alas! a moment too soon, for the Revolution changed everything.21
In 1789 young John Trumbull (second cousin to the poet of the same name and a son and brother to governors of Connecticut), realizing what the American Revolution meant for the arts, turned down a request to become Jefferson’s personal secretary in order to pursue a career as a painter. He knew that in the past Americans had thought of painting as “frivolous, little useful to Society, and unworthy the attention of a Man who possesses talents for more serious occupations.” Yet he believed that the Revolution offered an opportunity to alter the role of the arts and artists in society. By “commemorating the great Events of our Country’s Revolution” in paintings and engravings, Trumbull hoped, he told Jefferson in 1789, “to diffuse the knowledge and preserve the Memory of the noblest series of Actions which have ever dignified the History of Man:—to give to the present and the future Sons of Oppression and Misfortune such glorious Lessons of their rights and of the Spirit with which they should assert and support them:—and even to transmit to their descendents the personal resemblance of those who have been the great actors in those illustrious scenes.” Trumbull went on to become the principal painter of the American Revolution, depicting some of its great events, such as The Death of General Warren at Bunker’s Hill and The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, and painting hundreds of portraits of its participants.22
Still, there was the problem of sumptuousness and decadence traditionally associated with art. If Americans were to exceed Europe in dignity, grandeur, and taste, they would need a new kind of art, something appropriate to their new independent status as a nation. Somehow they would have to create a strictly republican art that avoided the vices of monarchical over-refinement and luxury that were destroying the Old World. The solution lay in the taut rationality of republican classicism. It emphasized, as the commissioners who were charged with supervising the construction of public buildings in Washington, D.C., put it in 1793, “a grandeur of conception, a Republican simplicity, and that true elegance of proportion, which correspond to a tempered freedom excluding Frivolity, the food of little minds.”23
Although such neoclassical thinking was cosmopolitan, it also possessed a nationalistic imperative. In this new enlightened age, Americans argued, nations had to distinguish themselves not by force of arms but, as the Massachusetts Magazine declared in 1792, “by art, science, and refinement.”24 It was therefore not paradoxical for American writers and artists to speak of emulating the best of European culture and in the same breath to recommend the need for native originality. Urging the exploitation of native themes and indigenous materials or the investigation of American antiquities and curiosities did not violate the neoclassical search for the eternally valid truths that underlay the particularities and diversities of the visible world. Americans told themselves that they could “recur to first principles, with ease, because our customs, tastes and refinements, are less artificial than those of other countries.”25
The principal criterion of art in this neoclassical era lay not in the genius of the artist or in the novelty of the work but rather in the effect of the art on the audience or spectator. Consequently, someone
like Joel Barlow could believe that his epic of America, Vision of Columbus (later the Columbiad), precisely because of its high moral and republican message, could exceed in grandeur even Homer’s Iliad.
George Washington certainly was impressed with Barlow, who labored over his six-thousand-line epic of future American greatness for twenty years. “Perhaps we shall be found, at this moment,” Washington told Lafayette in May 1788, “not inferior to the rest of the world in the performances of our poets and painters.” And he offered Barlow as an example of “a genius of the first magnitude; . . . and one of those Bards who hold the keys of the gate by which Patriots, Sages, and heroes are admitted to immortality.”26
The Revolution gave Americans the opportunity to put all these neoclassical ideas about art into effect. It created a sudden effusion of artistic and iconographic works, the extent of which has never been fully appreciated. Neoclassical themes, especially embodied in the classical goddesses Liberty and Minerva, appeared everywhere—in paintings, newspapers, coins, seals, almanacs, flags, weathervanes, wallpaper, and furniture.
All these icons and images were designed to bear moral and political messages. The Revolutionaries continually interrupted their constitutionmaking and military campaigning to sit for long hours having their portraits painted or to design all sorts of emblems, Latin mottoes, and commemorative medals. One of the most famous icons they created was the Great Seal of the United States (seen most commonly on the one-dollar bill).
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 69
