The Era of Jacksonian Democracy

close of the heroic period in American history brought about a decline in American art. This decline was connected with the advent of the Jacksonian era with its rapid development of capitalist relations, westward expansion and democratization of taste. The middle class grew in numbers and affluence. After the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 all sorts of profiteers, businessmen and adventurers who were making huge fortunes began to play a leading and predominant role in the social and political fife of the country. By the middle of the century they had formed a numerous and ponderable layer of American society. It was this self-opinionated, presumptuous and self-seeking middle class, hopelessly prosaic and culturally backward that determined the low level of current taste. American art was deeply affected by this leveling influence of “democratization”. Until the mid century portraiture retained its predominance, the demand for portraits even increased. Never had portrait production been so plentiful as in this period and never had portraits been so dull and characterless. With a few exception it was a deadly dull run-of-the-mill product, a stream of mediocre, largely routine, almost indistinguishable likenesses with neither character nor artistic interest. These flattering, idealized and sentimental portraits with literal and naturalistic depiction of detail conformed to the taste of the period “and met the requirements of the bourgeois clientele.Sully yielded to the corrupt tastes of “Jacksonian democracy”. With the close of the heroic period in American history his art began to deteriorate and after the 1820s he produced few good portraits. But “in comparison with Sully,” Milton Brown remarks, “his contemporaries were as determinedly pedestrian as their sitters were middle class. Aristocratic airs and psychological vitality had given way to the staidly sober and the conventionally pretty.”the portraitists of the time, the suppliers of idealizedportraits, were Charles Elliott, Samuel Morse, John Neagle, Chester Harding, Samuel Waldo, John Jarvis, but the most popular, no doubt, was George P. A. Healy, who was fantastically prolific. He returned to America for less than twelve years, but during this time, he painted more than five hundred portraits. Some of the earlier works of these artists were interesting but the bulk of the later output is dry and tiresome [ 1, p. 17-20 ]. painting american history landscapepeculiar feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art was the richness and variety of folk painting. In America folk painting played a much more important role than in European art. Many self-taught but able itinerant artists rambled over the countryside and now and then produced masterful works. They painted portraits, landscapes, houses, ships, still lifes, tavern signs, pictures of funerals. In many respects their works are similar to the paintings of the early limners. Most folk paintings have a certain degree of flatness. The figures have hard edges and clear boundaries marking the limits of the subject in space. Another feature of folk art is that the painter’s vision is direct. Folk artists avoid sophisticated poses, striking estures and props. They display artistic innocence and spontaneity, he most gifted folk artist of the nineteenth century was Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a coach and ornamental painter and a prominent Quaker preacher in Newtown, Pennsylvania. His work represents an exceptional example of folk unprofessional art. His best-known work is a naive romantic Utopia The Peaceable Kingdom. This was his favourite theme and he returned to it over and over again, producing between 1816 and 1849 nearly one hundred versions.West exerted a strong pull on the imagination of nineteenth-century Americans. The life of the Indians, the bitter conflict between Indians and settlers, daily life in the new raw communities provided subject matter of great novelty. Many artists went west to paint Indian life. The first important painter of Indians was George Catlin (1796-1872). The works that Indian painters produced before him have only historic or ethnographic interest. George Catlin was brave enough to venture into Indian encampments and spent eight years among the Indians of the Great Plains. He was obsessed with the desire to record pictorially the still living culture of the American Indian, to “snatch from hasty oblivion… a truly lofty and noble race”. With great sympathy he recorded the customs and habits of the various tribes and produced many portraits of Indian chiefs and other individuals who impressed him. He developed a swift, direct field style that enabled him to depict as many as half a dozen subjects a day.general the American attitude toward the Indian before the nineteenth century had been unequivocal - the only good one was a dead one. By 1830 the Indians had either been brutally exterminated or driven beyond the Mississippi, and in the vastness of the western plains they no longer posed an immediate obstacle or threat. In their remoteness they could even be thought of in Romantic terms, as examples of natural man, even as heroic and tragically doomed. Their exoticism in appearance and mode of existence added to the Romantic interest, and there was some anthropological and ethnographic interest in their customs. Travel in Indian country was not especially dangerous, since the tribes tended to honor their treaty commitments, and travelers did not find it difficult to live among them, as the literary and visual evidence seems to indicate. Not until the white man began to move westward again did the period of Indian Wars end the short interlude of peace. After the annexation of California and the discovery of gold in 1848, the inevitable urge toward unification of the continent led to a national policy of extermination. Meanwhile those who were interested could collect their data. Catlin became and has remained identified in the public mind as the Indian painter through his long years of devoted study, the authenticity of his observation, the great body of his production, and most of all his publications and the impassioned espousal of the Indian cause in his traveling exhibition and show, Made up of paintings, Indian costumes, and artifacts, and, at times, troupes of live Indians, the whole managed with great showmanship, the show toured the United States and Europe for fifteen years.in Wilkes-Barre, George Catlin practiced law in the surrounding area before turning to miniature and portrait painting in 1821, after which he plied that trade in Philadelphia, Albany, Richmond, and Washington for almost a decade. He had been captivated by the sight of a group of Indians in full regalia in the streets of Philadelphia and, years later, wrote: “The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the lifetime of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian.” By 1830 he was in St. Louis doing portraits of Indians, and two years later he started, out with an American Fur Company party taking the first steamboat up the Missouri 2.000 miles to Fort Union. Catlin spent almost eight years among the Indians, was the first artist to penetrate the Far West, and amassed close to six hundred paintings, which he assembled as his traveling Indian Gallery. His Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) went through many editions and, aside from its ethnographic value, became a source book for artists who had never seen a live Indian. Conscious of the red man’s doom, Catlin had made good his vow that through his art, phoenix-like, they “may rise from the stain of a painter’s palette’ “. His lack of training may actually have been a boon, for a sophisticated artist might have found the conditions under which he had to work too difficult, and those who came later and were trained could not help seeing in set formal patterns. Still, Catlin’s paintings lack the intrinsic interest to match the fascination of the subject as Audubon’s did. This is not to say that he lacked talent; despite his shortcomings he had an artist’s eye for the dramatic sight or moment, for composition, pattern, and linear movement. His scenes of Indian life, though often not much more than short hand notations, are full of vivacity. native genre tradition was continued by Eastman Johnson, who painted domestic city life, country occupations and recreations, and the world of children. He was a more entertaining storyteller than his predecessors, his paintings were more technically expert than Mount’s and Bingham’s but inferior in depth of feeling. Most of his genre paintings are overslick in execution, sentimental emotionally and anecdotal in subject. The Johnson’s most significant work is the Old Kentucky Home. It is one of the few canvases of the period that touched on social issues.1859, when Eastman Johnson painted his famous Old Kentucky Home, originally entitled Negro in the South, America was embroiled in the slavery issue, and in that context this idyllic, sentimental scene seems like wishful thinking. Johnson had been studying art abroad from 1849 to 1855, first in Disseldorf, then in the Hague, where he came to admire the Dutch seventeenth-century artists, especially Rembrandt; the soft light and vaporous shadows in Old Kentucky Home owe much to Rembrandt’s inspired chiaroscuro. Johnson had been in Europe too long, for it was naive at this time for a Northerner to conceive of happiness as compatible with servitude. Old Kentucky Home, at first glance, seems completely at variance with H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: well-fed slaves are seen content and relaxed, rather than oppressed and harrassed, and no masters are in sight except for one rather benign onlooker. But the Negroes live in squalour in the shadow of the white man’s large and substantial house, partially visible in the upper right-hand portion of the painting.human warmth radiating from the Old Kentucky Home is not evident in many of Johnson’s genre paintings of 1870 and later years. His In the Fields shows a group of people engaged in picking cranberries. It is a work that suggests comparison with Old Kentucky Home, for both paintings depict groups of people at leisure. While the Negroes entertain one another by strumming guitars, gossiping, and doing an impromptu dance, the cranberry pickers tend to be absorbed in their own thoughts [ 8, p. 201-211 ].emergence in 1820s of landscape painting was also linked with the growth of national consciousness after the end of the war with England (1812-1816). It was the first consciously national school of American painting. Later it was termed the Hudson River School because the artists first painted views of the Hudson Valley, and the places near which they lived. The number of artists who show an affinity with the Hudson River School amounted to fifty, with T. Cole, A. B. Durand, F. E. Church and A. Bierstadt as leading exponents. The artistic value of their work is very uneven. The tastes in art of the Jacksonian era ear-mark most of the Hudson River School landscapes. With all individual differences they have certain common features. They are large in size and panoramic in scope. The typical Hudson River School scene consists of a portion of virgin landscape, extending into the distant background, often with tiny figures against it. Sometimes, as with Cole, there is also a blasted tree prominent in the foreground, to suggest to the viewer the desolation of the place. The Hudson River School landscapes were romantic but their romanticism was literal: instead of expressing romantic ideas and emotions in artistic terms they literally represented romantic subjects. Many of their compositions were theatrical showpieces calculated to impress the viewer. Their gigantic size is combined with naturalistic literalness of detail. Such landscapes drew the greatest acclaim and commanded the highest prices, even outstripping portraiture in popularity. At the same time credit should be given to the Hudson River School painters for being the first to turn to their native American scene.first definite school of professional landscape painting did not appear until the middle of 1820’s - what came to be called the Hudson River School. The man who can be considered its founder was not native-born. Thomas Cole, English by birth, coming to America at seventeen, spent his youth in what were then the virgin forests of Ohio. Highly romantic, strongly religious, and-with a decided literary bent, Cole on coming to New York in 1825 found a cultural climate favorable to the growth of landscape, what with Washington Irving’s tales of the Hudson River Valley, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels of the wilderness, and William Cullen Bryant’s solemn nature poetry.his celebration of the American wilderness, still unravaged, Cole brought a romantic imagination, a love of solitude, and a realization of spaciousness and grandeur of this new world. He was the first to picture the wilderness with the passion of a poet, and to capture the wild beauty of the continent as it was a century and a half ago.the first Cole introduced a more living concept of landscape: a feeling for the life in nature, for her alterations of storm and peace, of clouds and serene light - the whole spectacle of the wilderness and its changing aspects, presented with a new dramatic sense and technical skill. Sometimes his Byronic fantasy led him from the sublime to the ridiculous. Often a religious element appeared, for Cole was concerned not only with nature for herself but as a setting for moralistic allegories. His series of painting such as The Departure and The Return (a knight gaily leaving his castle in the morning and borne home lifeless in the evening), or The Course of Empire, tracing in five acts the rise, splendour and ruin of an imaginary ancient capital, illustrated his thoughts on the vanity of worldly power and pleasure, and true inevitable destruction that overtakes them. Most of these works were pure Hollywood, but in his finest series, The Voyage of Life, he achieved powerful pictorial drama. An artist capable of deplorable corniness, he also created the most vital landscape painting so far in America.to Cole as a leader of the Hudson River School was Asher B. Durand. With him, Cole’s flamboyant imagination was replaced by a sober affection for nature: His painstaking hand recorded every detail - the lichened tree trunks, the vine-covered rocks, the flowers and weeds in the foreground. His engaging Kindred Spirits, showing Cole and Bryant in a mountain landscape, painted the year after Cole’s death, was a memorial, like the poet’s tribute to their mutual friend.’s grandiose romanticism and Durand’s literal naturalism • were the chief influences on the younger painters of the Hudson River School. These artists formed a consciously native school -the first in American art. Many of them were friends, going on walking and sketching trips together in the Catsldlls, the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. They were tremendously proud of America’s national beauties - the grandeur of her mountains, the wildness of her forests, the blazing colors of her autumn foliage. Though most of them visited Europe to paint its picturesque places, sometimes remaining for years, their admiration for their own land remained undimmed.the typical Hudson River landscape the canvas is enormous, the view-point panoramic; yet so meticulous is the handling that one can count every leaf. In the huge paintings of Church, Bierstadt and Moran, with which the school’s grandiose tendencies culminated, the technical proficiency is astounding. Their panoramas were even more extensive than Cole’s, while every detail, the exact character of every growing thing, every phenomenon of light and atmosphere and. weather, were rendered with more than photographic accuracy.artistic limitations of the school were obvious enough. Though contemporaries of the French romantics and the Barbizon school, they showed no awareness of the new trends that were transforming European art, or else they were definitely opposed; to them even Corot was still a revolutionary. Compared to trends in France, their artistic concepts were anachronistic. Their romanticism took the form of literal representation of romantic subjects, rather than expression of romantic emotion in the language of form and color as with Gericault and Delacroix.their direct contact with nature, their observation, and their skill of eye and hand, are values that have endured. In the wideranging works of Bierstadt, for example, especially in his less pretentious or highly finished canvases, one continually meets with fresh, unconventional recording of light, color and weather -the work of an acute visual observer. And Church, in a painting like Twilight in the Wilderness, achieved colour as daring as any optical painter today. If these men had been less committed to literal naturalism, if they had trusted their visual sensations more, their contribution would have been a less baffling combination of art and non-art.their best landscapes the character of the American land, its spaciousness and solitude, the clearness of its air, the brilliance of its light, its high remote skies, were pictured truly and with a romantic emotion that is still alive. Their works had a leisurely completeness, a feeling for nature in her myriad aspects, tragic as well as smiling, and a sense of her solid substance and moving forces, rather than her mere appearances - qualities that were lost in the more intimate, fragmentary landscapes of their successors.to the Hudson River School with their grandiose and stagy landscape arrangements, and their theatricality was a sizable group of artists who were moving toward an increasinglyintimate and unpretentious realism, which stressed the poetic effect of varying kinds of light on stretches of water, woodland, Or inhabited countryside. Their pictures were not so successful commercially as the paintings by Church or Bierstadt. Their paintings are distinguished by a poetic sensitivity, which found expression in the depiction of familiar scenes transmuted by the varying moods of the weather. The most sensitive of the group were Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) and Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904).other landscapists not members of the Hudson River School produced works of highly personal vision. Fitz Hugh Lane’s modest views of quiet harbours and inlets along the Massachusetts and Maine coast, painted with exquisite preciseness, were pervaded by a calm serenity. Somewhat similar were Martin J. Heade’s coastal scenes, in which the sense of loneliness of all-embracing light, of crystalline clarity, attained a penetrating intensity. But Heade’s temperament had other sides; the rich romantic profusion of his tropical landscapes such as View of Tree Fern Walk, Jamaica; the exotic beauty of his series of South American orchids and hummingbirds; the brooding sensuousness of his flower still lifes; the threatening drama of Storm over Narragansett. His sensibility, different from the objectivity of the Hudson River painters, foretold the future development of American landscape [11, p. 313 ].