Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (94 page)

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

E
VEN PRIOR TO THE
R
EVOLUTION
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).

Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams all took a stab at designing it—a measure of the importance they gave to the icons of the Revolution. Franklin proposed a biblical scene, that of Moses “lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.” Jefferson suggested a similar biblical scene, “the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.” Adams proposed Hercules surveying the choice between Virtue and Sloth, the most popular of emblems in the eighteenth century. Since these designs proved “too complicated,” as Adams
admitted, Congress turned the job over to the secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson, who finally worked out the present seal. The emblazoned eagle on one side was a symbol of empire. The pyramid on the other side, perhaps drawn from Masonic symbolism, represented the strength of the new nation. The all-seeing eye on the reverse stood for providence. And the Latin mottoes,
Novus Ordo Seclorum
—” a new order of the ages”—and
Annuit Coeptis
—”He has looked after us”—were taken from Virgil.
²⁷

A
LTHOUGH MANY
A
MERICAN LEADERS
sought to use art to further the Revolution, no one could match Charles Willson Peale in creating icons. He became a one-man dynamo on behalf of the patriot cause, completing sixty-five paintings in the year 1776 alone.
²⁸
He was an extraordinary character—at one time or another artist, politician, scientist, tinker, and showman, yet remaining throughout his life, in his optimism and enthusiasm, as Benjamin Latrobe said, “a
boy
in many respects.”
²⁹

Peale began life as an apprenticed saddle-maker, tried his hand as an upholsterer, silversmith, and clock and watch repairer, but eventually turned to painting portraits for money. Unlike Copley and Trumbull, Peale never lost the sense that his painting was a kind of craft or “business,” not all that different from what he called “his other Trades.”
³⁰
Some gentry patrons, impressed with his artistic talent, sent him to London in 1767 to study with Benjamin West. When he returned to America in 1769, he threw himself into the Revolutionary movement. His radicalism cost him portrait commissions from wealthy Philadelphians, and at the end of the war he formally renounced politics and devoted all his energy to painting (sixty portraits of Washington alone), science, and raising his huge artistically inclined family, including such accomplished and prophetically named sons as Titian, Rembrandt, and Raphael. By the 1780s he was deeply involved in a variety of projects, ranging from an effigy of Benedict Arnold to a forty-foot-high Triumphal Arch spanning Market Street in Philadelphia and lit by a thousand lamps. Unfortunately,
the arch caught fire and was destroyed, and its creator was nearly killed. But such disasters did not dampen Peale’s enthusiasm. In one way or another he became involved in nearly all of Philadelphia’s civic ceremonies during the 1780s and 1790s.

Peale’s most famous creation was his museum, which was designed, he declared, to promote “the interests of religion and morality by the arrangement and display of the works of nature and art.”
³¹
When he opened it in 1786 in concert with his brother James, he knew that educating the public in enlightened republicanism had to be its main justification. Peale added to his Philadelphia gallery of paintings, especially of the Revolutionary leaders, some fossils and a collection of stuffed birds and wild animals. When interest in this menagerie picked up, Peale included a miniature theater with transparent moving pictures.

In 1802 the museum was moved to the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), where it became a profitable institution attended by thousands of visitors. Unlike the European museums, which tended to open their exhibitions only to select or privileged groups befitting Europe’s hierarchal societies, Peale’s museum was designed as a republican institution open to anyone who could pay the twenty-five-cent admission fee. Peale wanted an admission fee, but only a small one, “for if a Museum was free to all to view it without cost,” he said, “it would be over-run & abused—on the other hand, if too difficult of access, it would lose its utility; that of giving information generally.” By 1815 Peale’s museum was attracting nearly forty thousand visitors a year.
³²

In addition to the mammoth that he exhumed in 1802, Peale kept adding more and more creatures and curiosities to his museum, which he wanted to call the “Temple of Wisdom,” but declined to do so for fear of offending religious sensibilities. His museum became the repository for specimens and artifacts collected by official explorations into the West, including the Lewis and Clark expedition. He hoped that his museum would “bring into one view a world in miniature” and teach visitors the overall design and rationality of the universe. Contemplating “the beautiful uniformity in an infinite variety of beings,” he said in a notable address of 1800, would “raise us above ourselves.” His view of the universe was thoroughly taxonomic. He even placed his portraits above the natural history cabinets in order to stress the natural order of a world dominated by man. He hoped that young children might learn from the harmony of nature to refrain from “cruelly, or wantonly tormenting” insects and other
natural creatures. Such knowledge, Peale said, would thus have the effect of “instilling and extending, as they advance in years, a sweet benevolence of temper toward their brethren.”
³³