Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ age shall give them to the day.” Or, in the words of another, “Beauty will soon fade away,/But learning never will decay.” All of these lines, culled from late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century samplers, could as easily have been drawn from copybooks from the same period.⁶⁴

      Literary themes and print culture more generally also dominated young women’s pictorial embroidery and their paintings. The characters and plots of much-loved books, mediated by imported, engraved prints, provided scores of young women with fodder for needles and paintbrushes. Many students, for example, worked from illustrations from James Thomson’s perennially popular book of verse, The Seasons. Following the lead of British painters and engravers, teachers and “schoolgirl” artists were especially keen to reproduce the plate for “Autumn,” which showed the gentleman Palemon confessing his love to rustic Lavinia. Others favored themes that infused polite culture with civic duty and nationalism. In 1804, a student named Mary Beach created a large needlework copy of a Francesco Bartolozzi engraving taken from Angelica Kauffman’s painting of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi. Cornelia was a figure revered in the early republic for her eloquence as well as her maternal strength. By choosing Cornelia, Beach (or, more likely, her teacher) simultaneously signaled her republican commitments and her familiarity with the cosmopolitan world of engraved prints. Similar sentiments were at work in the many pieces of art honoring George Washington. Elaborate renditions of prints depicting the Washington family were common subjects. Washington’s death in 1799 predictably prompted an outpouring of mourning art. Even Mount Vernon attracted its share of attention from academy instructors and their students.⁶⁵

      Whatever they depicted, these images were created explicitly for display. The paintings and embroideries created by female students were generally framed, often at great expense. One Connecticut man recalled that any young woman who had attended an academy was “expected to bring home … some evidence of proficiency in her studies. Those who could, exhibited elaborate water color drawings which have hung ever since on the walls of … [local] Parlors.” In fact, the imperative to display girls’ accomplishments was so strong that frame-making began to employ significant numbers of artisans when and where schoolgirls began to make art.⁶⁶

      It is far harder to generalize about the artistic work of boys and young men, if only because so little of it has survived. That, in and of itself, is suggestive. Whatever happened to those drawings and paintings, they were not encased in expensive frames, hung up in family parlors, or passed lovingly from one generation to the next. They were never, in other words, intended for display outside the walls of the academy. But the short life of the final product (pictures) does not mean that the process (learning to draw) was unimportant. On the contrary. Thomas Jefferson took pains to ensure that the University of Virginia included drawing and painting in its curriculum. At the prestigious Nazareth Hall, drawing was a mandatory and integral part of the curriculum. In an 1815 poem celebrating the school’s effect on its students, the principal W. H. Van Vleck ranked the transformative power of drawing alongside that of the classics:

      There first with rapt’rous eye, the page sublime

      Of classic Rome and Greece I wandered o’er;

      Now dared with, with venturous pencil, to portray

      Fair Nature’s smiling face in mimic hues. …

      Clearly, the ability to draw signified. But how exactly?⁶⁷

      The extraordinarily rich collection of surviving student drawings from Nazareth Hall can suggest some answers to that question. The young men who attended Nazareth Hall between 1785 and 1830, much like their female counterparts at academies throughout the country, learned to draw by copying examples selected by their teachers. And by the 1810s, a small number of students produced images analogous to the ones painted and embroidered by female students—botanical drawings complemented by Latin names and root systems, landscapes, and genre scenes. One young man, whose ambition outstripped his talent, painted a copy of Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, an image that had circulated widely through the colonies as an engraved print. Yet the majority of images produced at Nazareth Hall bear little resemblance to these polished, detailed images and even less resemblance to the painted and embroidered pictures that young women created.⁶⁸ The lion’s share of the young men who learned to draw at Nazareth Hall did not reproduce complete images, much less images that thematized an expansive, transatlantic print culture. Instead, their training conformed more or less to the trajectory advocated in the drawing manuals that circulated on the continent and in Britain from the sixteenth century on. (In this case, the manual was the multivolume treatise written by Preissler, who served as the director of the Nuremburg Academy of Art in the early eighteenth century.) Academic artists and drawing masters began with the assumption that pictorial representation unfolded systematically; perceptual deconstruction preceded pictorial reconstruction. A draftsman first learned to break complex forms down into composite parts, which were in turn reduced to the most basic geometric shapes, lines, and proportions. Only after mastering the pieces, after learning to recognize and reproduce the basic elements of each constituent element, could the artist aspire to the whole. The studies of eyes, heads, and feet completed by the Nazareth Hall students stand at a midpoint in this trajectory. The young draftsmen have moved beyond curved lines, geometric shapes, and basic outlines; they stop short of full compositions. The drawings do not signal an interrupted process; the students have progressed as far as their teacher intended. The schematic, formulaic figure studies that the students completed were of a piece with their architectural drawings, which aimed at familiarizing them with classical styles and proportions and the basic principles of mensuration.⁶⁹

      Figure 9. Charles Schweiniz was one of many students at Nazareth Hall to copy this head from Johann Daniel Preissler’s drawing manual. Nazareth, PA, 1789. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

      This was not preprofessional training; it did not impart a salable skill. Instead, the lessons were as much about learning to observe and to recognize as learning to draw.⁷⁰ These exercises, which had become a routine component of an English gentleman’s education by the first half of the eighteenth century, taught republican gentlemen to see with a draftsman’s eye. This carefully schooled perception was simultaneously a physical and intellectual process. It was likewise a metaphor for a way of being in the world. It enabled individuals to look beyond incidental variations and petty distinctions and seek out the transcendent and the universal in nature and society. It resonated with scientific convictions that pictorial representation could mirror a legible natural world. Of course, this visual proficiency was as prescriptive as it was mimetic. It instilled a set of standards that could be used for judging artistic representations and for assessing the merits of real objects and individuals. Just as important, the visual skills taught through drawing lessons held out the distinctly republican promise of access. The elegantly reasoned world represented in sketches of faces and columns is within the reach of diligent schoolboys.

      Figure 10. Ludwig Schweiniz drew this Tuscan column to demonstrate his familiarity with the classical orders of architecture for an examination. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

      Setting the extant drawings from Nazareth Hall alongside abundant examples of schoolgirl art, we can begin to see how the gendered production of art shaped the cultural meanings of emulation. The male students’ drawings, like the engravings in Preissler’s manual, do not depict any particular face, foot, or column. Instead, they describe a series of ideal types. Recapitulating assumptions that stood at the center of the Enlightenment project, the drawings’ techniques and subjects champion the universal over the particular. The draftsmen СКАЧАТЬ