Introduction: The U.S. was no longer a colony of England or Spain, and indeed had uneasy relations with Canada and Mexico, which maintained colonial ties to Europe. It still remained a cultural colony of Europe, however, especially in the plastic arts such as painting. Standards were set in Europe. American artists went to Europe to study proper technique. At the same time, some Americans were calling for a distinctive "American" art. What might this be?

To an American Painter Departing for Europe (William Cullen Bryant, on the occasion of his friend Thomas Cole leaving to study painting in Europe)

Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies:
Yet, Cole! thy heart shall bear to Europe's strand
A living image of thy native land,
Such as on thy own glorious canvass lies.
Lone lakes -- savannahs where the bison roves --
Rocks rich with summer garlands -- solemn streams
Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams --
Spring bloom and autumn blaze of boundless groves.
Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest -- fair,
But different -- every where the trace of men,
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
Gaze on them, till the tear shall dim my sight,
But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.

What Bryant hoped was that Cole would stick to American themes as with this painting of Daniel Boone sitting at the door of his cabin. Soon after his migration to the U.S. from England in 1819, Cole (1801-1848) helped found the Hudson River School of painting which celebrated the grandeur of American landscapes. In 1826, for example, he painted this sunrise.

A fascination with the awesome character of natural landscapes characterized much of Cole's work. In 1839, for example, he painted "Crawford Notch," a mountain pass in the White Mountains in New Hampshire that had been the site of an avalanche in 1826 that claimed nine lives. In Cole's treatment the storm looms in the upper left; stumps and blasted trees in the lower right suggest the efforts of settlers to tame nature even as the small cabin in the lower center contrasts with the immensity of the mountains.

Cole clearly heeded Bryant's plea. He did keep that "wilder image bright." But he painted in a conventionally European manner. And, when he turned from landscapes to images of civilization, he thought in terms of conventional European images. This is stunningly apparent in his immensely popular "The Course of Empire." [See the Web Connection for Chapter 9.] His second panel, for example, which portrayed the "Acadian" stage, used a classic Roman temple along with cultivated gardens instead of the cabin he chose for "Daniel Boone" or "Crawford Notch."

An even clearer example is his sketch for the Ohio State Capitol building. Here too the source of Cole's inspiration is Ancient Rome. Cole's work nicely illustrates the derivative character of most American Art through the first half of the nineteenth century. One went to Europe to learn how to paint. One looked at American scenes with European eyes. The measure of one's artistic achievement was to gain recognition in Europe.

This held for American audiences as well as artists. They too prized paintings done in the manner of European artists; they chose European architectural models for their homes and public buildings; and they flocked by the hundreds of thousands to view Hiram Power's "The Greek Slave," by far the most popular sculpture by an American in the first half of the nineteenth century. The work portrays a Greek girl captured by the Turks and put up for sale in a Middle Eastern slave market. The sculptor said of his work: "As there should be a moral in every work of art, I have given to the expression of the Greek slave what trust there could still be in a Divine Providence for a future state of existence, with utter despair for the present, mingled somewhat of scorn for all around her . . . It is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed." Powers made six versions of the statue, differing somewhat in the shape of the slave's chains and other details. Miniature copies of the statue were immensely popular for the rest of the century, "so undressed, yet so refined, in sugar-white alabaster, exposed under little glass covers in such American homes as could bring themselves to think such things right," as novelist Henry James sarcastically put it [both quoted in Oliver Larkin, Art and Life in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 180, 181].

Robert Hughes argues that:

By the 1840s Powers was incontestably the most famous sculptor America had yet produced, and he became so (inside America) with one marble, The Greek Slave, c. 1843, an adapted copy of the Uffizi's Medici Venus, with some chains on her wrists as a cache-sexe. This, Americans thought, was the first truly moral nude they had ever seen . . . . Powers astutely explained, in the pamphlet that accompained his statue on its American tour in 1847, that his slave's nudity was not her fault: she had been divested of her clothes by the lustful and impious Turks who put her on the auction block; thus her unwilling nakedness signified the purest form of the Ideal, the triumph of Christian virtue over sin. This sales pitch, aimed point-blank at Puritan sensibilities, worked so well that American Clergymen urged their congregations to go and see The Greek Slave. — American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 216-217.

The statue inspired poets and newspaper editors like Horace Greeley as well as clergy. For the full text, click here. Greeley wrote:

On the first opening of this statue we briefly expressed the deep effect which as it seemed to us it must produce on every beholder. Since that time it has been exhibited for several days, and has been visited by constantly increasing numbers. Had our impression needed any confirmation we should have found it in the silent and absorbed attention with which we have seen the statue regarded by spectators of all classes and ages. People sit before it as rapt and almost as silent as devotees at a religious ceremony. The same surprise and delight, and the same elevation of sentiment seem in various degrees to be felt by all comers; whatever may be the critical judgement of individuals as to the merits of the work, there is no mistake about the feeling which it awakens.

Final validation of the work's artistic merit came from England. It was exhibited at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London in 1851 where it attracted the same "rapt" attention. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was sufficiently moved to create a sonnet:

Almost no one who commented on the statue made any reference to American slavery. (An exception is an 1851 poem by Mary Irving.) That was left to Punch, the British humor magazine which published "The Virginian Slave." Even anti-slavery activists, like Greeley, did not relate the statue to America's own "peculiar institutution."

Powers made enough money from exhibiting his statue to move to Italy where he continued his career of sculpting "moral nudes."


"America"


"California"


"Last of the Tribe"

Stop and Consider:

Most of the music Americans composed was equally based upon European models. You can hear this in the songs of the most popular composer of the day, Stephen Foster. [Can we insert an audio file to "Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair"? There is one on the PBS Foster site <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/index.html>] What would be new and distinctive about American music, the infusion of African elements via Spirituals, blues, and ragtime, awaited the ending of slavery, although Foster and other white American composers did seek to incorporate African-American elements in songs written for minstrel shows. Foster's "Old Folks At Home" is a example.

Some distinctive American voices were beginning to sound: Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller are examples. Of these, Whitman was the most self-consciously American. At left is an 1854 portrait. The following year he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Dickinson wrote some of her finest poems in the 1850s but did not publish any of them. The first full edition of her poetry, which appeared after her death, had this Epigram:

THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me. . . .

One of the most influential voices calling for an "American" art and literature belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson whose lectures and essays made him one of the most celebrated Americans of the 1840s and 1850s. In an address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard College in 1837, Emerson made his most famous appeal for the emergence of "The American Scholar":

. . . We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, -- but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, -- some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, -- patience; -- with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; -- not to be reckoned one character; -- not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, -- please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Walt Whitman wrote a kind of response, in a letter to Emerson, almost twenty years later:

Of course, we shall have a national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon -- with the states around the Mexican sea -- with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa -- with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island -- with all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis -- there is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of The States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception whatever -- each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality -- that new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat -- that newer America, answering face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas and shores. — "Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson," Brooklyn, August, 1856.

Whitman opened Leaves of Grass on a most Emersonian note:

I CELEBRATE myself,

. . . . . . .

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the
eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

In the preface to Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, Whitman issued his own call for an "American" art:

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes . . . . Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the performance disdaining the trivial unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its perspective spreads with crampless and flowing breadth and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.

Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships---the freshness and candor of their physiognomy---the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom---their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean---the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states---the fierceness of their roused resentment--- their curiosity and welcome of novelty---their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy---their susceptibility to a slight---the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors---the fluency of their speech---their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul . . . their good temper and openhandedness---the terrible significance of their elections---the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him---these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick would be pronounced the greatest and most "American" novel of pre-Civil War America, wrote his own stirring call for an "American" literature in the form of a tribute to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Let America then prize and cherish her writers, yea, let her glorify them. They are not so many in number, as to exhaust her good-will. And while she has good kith and kin of her own, to take to her bosom, let her not lavish her embraces upon the household of an alien. For believe it or not, England, after all, is, in many things, an alien to us. China has more bowels of real love for us than she. But even were there no strong literary individualities among us, as there are some dozen at least, nevertheless, let America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises (for everywhere, merit demands acknowledgment from every one) the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let her own authors, I say, have the priority of appreciation. I was very much pleased with a hot-headed Carolina cousin of mine, who once said,--"If there were no other American to stand by, in Literature,--why, then, I would stand by Pop Emmons and his 'Fredoniad,' and till a better epic came along, swear it was not very far behind the 'Iliad'." Take away the words, and in spirit he was sound.

Not that American genius needs patronage in order to expand. For that explosive sort of stuff will expand though screwed up in a vice, and burst it, though it were triple steel. It is for the nation's sake, and not for her authors' sake, that I would have America be heedful of the increasing greatness among her writers. For how great the shame, if other nations should be before her, in crowning her heroes of the pen. But this is almost the case now. American authors have received more just and discriminating praise (however loftily and ridiculously given, in certain cases) even from some Englishmen, than from their own countrymen. There are hardly five critics in America, and several of them are asleep. As for patronage, it is the American author who now patronizes the country, and not his country him. And if at times some among them appeal to the people for more recognition, it is not always with selfish motives, but patriotic ones.

It is true, that but few of them as yet have evinced that decided originality which merits great praise. But that graceful writer, who perhaps of all Americans has received the most plaudits from his own country for his productions,--that very popular and amiable writer, however good, and self-reliant in many things, perhaps owes his chief reputation to the self-acknowledged imitation of a foreign model, and to the studied avoidance of all topics but smooth ones. But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,--it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers. Without malice, but to speak the plain fact, they but furnish an appendix to Goldsmith, and other English authors. And we want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons. . . . Call him an American, and have done, for you can not say a nobler thing of him.--But it is not meant that all American writers should studiously cleave to nationality in their writings; only this, no American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American. Let us away with this leaven of literary flunkyism towards England. If either we must play the flunky in this thing, let England do it, not us. While we are rapidly preparing for that political supremacy among the nations, which prophetically awaits us at the close of the present century; in a literary point of view, we are deplorably unprepared for it; and we seem studious to remain so. Hitherto, reasons might have existed why this should be; but no good reason exists now. And all that is requisite to amendment in this matter, is simply this: that, while freely acknowledging all excellence, everywhere, we should refrain from unduly lauding foreign writers, and, at the same time, duly recognize the meritorious writers that are our own,--those writers, who breathe that unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things, which now takes the practical lead in the world, though at the same time led by ourselves--us Americans. Let us boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning; and foster all originality, though, at first, it be crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots. And if any of our authors fail, or seem to fail, then, in the words of my enthusiastic Carolina cousin, let us clap him on the shoulder, and back him against all Europe for his second round. The truth is, that in our point of view, this matter of a national literature has come to such a pass with us, that in some sense we must turn bullies, else the day is lost, or superiority so far beyond us, that we can hardly say it will ever be ours.

And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author, of your own flesh and blood,--an unimitating, and perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man--whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writer. The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara. Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own generation; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses in him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him, you thereby confess others, you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. — "Hawthorne and his Mosses," The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850

Summary: It is not surprising that a distinctive "American" art developed first in literature. As with any group of speakers of a language, Americans inevitably developed their own distinctive idioms and linguistic habits, their own slang. American authors, to the extent they did not censor their own speech, would use these distinctively American words and phrases and habits of speech. Whitman developed a passion for American turns of phrase and for poems that embodied what he saw as distinctively American ways of looking and touching and smelling as well as talking. Melville too sought to capture the authentic speech of his characters. And both were self-consciously responding to Emerson's call in "The American Scholar" address.

Reflect and Respond: