Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ dismissals of the merely mechanical offered a distorted representation of the lived experience of the majority of American painters, who struggled to acquire even basic technique. So, too, the hard and fast distinctions between the work of the eye and the work of the hand, for there was no denying that, on a fundamental level, painting was a manual art that owed much to the delicacy and dexterity of an artist’s hand as it moved a brush over a piece of canvas or ivory. Yet the dematerialization of the practice of painting was a useful gambit precisely because it reinforced artists’ claims to membership in the republic of taste. Small wonder, then, that it appeared so regularly in artists’ textual self-representations. The selves fashioned by painters like Greenwood, Dunlap, and Harding gained (or squandered) cultural and financial capital with their eyes rather than their hands.

      Greenwood’s extant journals, for example, simultaneously mark his progress as a painter and museum keeper and figure that progress as the development of visual acuity. He succeeded at painting and museum keeping because he had learned to succeed at looking.³² Greenwood’s interest in art is apparent almost from the journal’s earliest entries, which note his acquisition of canvases stretched on “frames suitable for painting” and his early efforts at portraiture. During the years when he vacillated between a career in law and a career in art, Greenwood made cursory notes about his painting output. The entries changed in frequency and tone after 1813 when Greenwood decided to devote himself “strictly to painting.”³³ He began to take greater care in recording details about his artistic output. He was more likely to list his subjects individually and to single out exotic and unusual sitters like “Wha-Shing, a Chinese gentleman,” “John Smith a dwarf 18 years old,” and “Mr. Harry Gates of Hubbardston,” whose “face was distorted by a wound on Bunker Hill.” He noted subjects who were especially difficult to paint, like an eighty-three-year-old woman who was “so feeble” she could only “sit in position” a few minutes at a time.³⁴

      Greenwood also began to record purchases that signaled attempts to cultivate his eye and to demonstrate his taste. He subscribed to Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio, which set itself up as a national arbiter of culture and the arts, and spent $25 to procure back issues. He purchased the published works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, including the Discourses, which provided a civic justification for art and codified the eighteenth-century Anglo-American aesthetic. He stepped up his acquisition of engraved prints and copies of European paintings and began to purchase plaster busts. By the end of 1817, he was able to boast that, notwithstanding several months’ illness, he had managed to “increase my Library, my collection of painting, prints, statuary &c. very considerably.”³⁵

      The entries in Greenwood’s journal are so terse that it is tempting to treat the whole as an account book for tracking pictures painted and objects purchased. But if the journal functioned on that level—and it certainly did, especially after he opened the New England Museum—it also bore witness to Greenwood’s visual engagement with the world and his sustained attempts to develop his taste. The acquisition of things and experiences, like the notations that fixed them in his journal, served as a kind of commonplacing. Both sets of practices internalized a conventional set of aesthetic values and marked his growing connoisseurship. And both enabled him to position himself as someone who looked out at the world from the perspective of the tasteful few.

      Occasionally his looking was dilatory and aimless, as it was on the December afternoon when he recorded that he “went to auction a little, & elsewhere a little, & thus littled away the day.” But generally it was purposeful and directed. He sought out private collections in and around Boston, the better to learn from others’ taste. Thus he traveled the ten miles to Milton to see the elegant paintings belonging to Miss Lucy Smith, a woman distinguished by her “good sense and elegant manner” and “Waited on Miss Hannah Adams” in order to see “Bonaparte’s pictures, St. Domingo, &c.” While painting a portrait in Pomfret, Connecticut, he sought out Anne Hall’s father and his “fine & valuable collection of pictures which he has shown me very politely.”³⁶ And when he spent an evening at Boston’s Mansion House in order to view “the very valuable collection of paintings & pictures” owned by John Hancock’s widow, he wrote that he hoped to be “improved by this examination.”³⁷

      Traveling exhibitions offered Greenwood another opportunity for improvement. He took in panoramas of Paris, Constantinople, and the Battle of Waterloo, the last of which he attended with a fellow artist, Sarah Goodrich.³⁸ When American painters with academic ambitions displayed their masterpieces in Boston, Greenwood was invariably on hand. In 1815, he paid to see Henry Sargent’s Landing of the Fathers, which depicted the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock, and he may well have supplemented his viewing by reading the New England Palladium and Commercial Advertiser, which offered its readers step-by-step instructions for studying the painting, carefully dissecting the appropriate movement of the eye over the canvas.³⁹ A few months later, he made arrangements to exhibit Samuel Morse’s Dying Hercules when it arrived in Boston from the Royal Academy, where it had received “the highest approbation and applause.” He obtained both the enormous painting and the plaster model that Morse had made to help resolve the technical difficulties of representing the reclining figure. The exhibition, which took place in Greenwood’s painting rooms, generated revenue directly, through the 25-cent admission he charged, and indirectly, by increasing his visibility among potential clients. But housing the two pieces together also afforded Greenwood a rare opportunity for sustained, close study of a grand manner painting along with the even rarer opportunity to copy the painting by using the original painter’s method of looking back and forth between the three-dimensional model and two-dimensional canvas. The majestic painting had been in his rooms less than a week when he began to copy it. Whatever his profit from exhibiting the Dying Hercules, Greenwood made sure he capitalized on the chance to duplicate Morse’s method.⁴⁰

      On the rare occasions when Greenwood ventured outside New England, he recorded his attempts to consume the world with his eyes. The year before he opened the museum, he traveled south and, like other American travelers, recorded his experiences as a series of views: He was disappointed by the appearance of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a “Principally Dutch” town marked by “a want of elegance in everything, no taste in buildings, dress, or manner.” The moment he crossed into the slave South, the “misery and stupidity,” the “ignorance & total want of taste” were to be seen everywhere. When he entered Washington, D.C., he “saw its desolation & barrenness.” In livelier cities, his looking became far more urgent. He devoted himself “diligently to seeing every curious thing” in Baltimore; in New York, he vowed “to see & examine everything relating to the fine arts.” Over the course of a single month, he spent time at the Peale family’s museums in both Baltimore and Philadelphia; visited the studios of painters ranging from Charles Bird King to Mary Way; browsed bookstores, print shops, and gilders’ workshops; attended concerts and the theater; and toured the U.S. Mint and the Philadelphia Athenaeum.⁴¹

      Subsequent trips to New York and Philadelphia found Greenwood equally determined to “view … every interesting curiosity I could meet with.” During a twelve-hour stay in New York City in 1821, he saw the gallery of wax figures at the Shakespeare Gallery, the Rotunda where John Vanderlyn displayed his panoramas, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, the Mechanical Theater, Scudder’s Museum (which he visited twice, once during the day and again at night), and the theater.⁴² A few years later, during a week divided between New York City and Philadelphia, Greenwood’s agenda included the Peale, Scudder, and Sharpless museums; a medical college museum; both the American Academy of the Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he saw “West’s great picture of Christ Healing the Sick”; and a morning in New York spent “in still further examination of everything curious with Col. Trumbull.” “In fact,” he wrote of this flying visit, “I looked at everything with all my might.”⁴³

      Like the curiosity cabinets assembled by wealthy collectors, these cities provided Greenwood with fodder for observation, consideration, and criticism. His compressed visits served, in СКАЧАТЬ