have honored Mary Du Bose of Georgia, their “favourite girl,” by electing her May Queen. Surrounded by her loving peers, Du Bose sits in the center of the canvas, facing an audience that includes faculty, townspeople, children, and slaves. As the queen is wreathed with flowers, her fellow student, Ann W. Clark, recites an address that simultaneously celebrates the pleasures of spring, when “all nature is now attired in its loveliest robe,” and warns that those pleasures are bound to fade. The fate of the season and of the students is the same. The “blooming crown” of spring blossoms will soon decay, reminding Du Bose of “beauty’s transient glow, while its fragrant sweetness forcibly inculcates the superior charms of virtue.” Quoting lines from Cowper that were as suitable for a commonplace book or a sampler as they were for an address, Clark pronounces “the only amaranthine flower on earth, is Virtue—the only lasting treasure, Truth.”78
Perhaps. But Marling’s painting is more concerned with display and publicity than with “amaranthine flowers” or “lasting treasures.” The celebration of aestheticized, feminized publicity plays out on multiple levels. Marling himself was among the audience, perhaps invited because his wife was the academy’s art teacher. He sketched the scene as it unfolded in order to share the moment with a larger audience who frequented his “exhibition gallery.” A lengthy description of the event, including Du Bose’s and Clark’s names, a transcription of Clark’s speech, and a discussion of Marling’s planned painting, was reported in regional papers and approvingly reprinted in both the New-York Weekly Museum and the Port Folio. The fusion of taste and learning enabled a virtuous, distinctly feminine publicity.79
Marling painted a romantic May Day celebration rather than a sober annual examination; Du Bose was singled out for her popularity rather than her intellect. Nevertheless, the May Queen reproduces many of the conventions of the academy exhibition: the white-gowned young ladies; the staged accomplishment; the attentive, genteel spectators; and the multiple varieties of publicity. More than that, the painting helps us to recognize the pronounced resemblances between the female students who assembled to exhibit their learning and skill and the painted and embroidered female figures who populated their artwork. The same aesthetic—which might be summed up as the willful physical projection of a deeply internalized taste and sensibility—is at work in the painting, in abundant samples of schoolgirl art, and in young women’s studied self-presentation. And why not? For if one of the main aims of an academy education was, in Pierce’s terms, “to create or direct taste,” then these young women had surpassed the goal. More than acquiring taste, they had become it. And they had done so in a context where, as we have seen, taste had considerable moral and political purchase.
But that process of becoming cut in multiple directions. On the one hand, it allowed women to stake a claim to the republic of taste and to play a crucial role in maintaining its boundaries. On the other hand, it raised questions about the legitimacy of women’s claims to full participation within the republic of the United States. The same commonplace books, pictures, and performances that registered virtuous taste also summoned to mind the threatening specter of luxury, commodities, and consumption that haunted the public discourse on reading and accomplishment. This specter was made manifest at academy exhibitions, not only in the skills and supplies that schoolgirl artists purchased, but also in the ways that their paintings and embroideries emulated and referenced luxury goods. Worse, young women’s accomplishments revealed the degree to which republican self-fashioning and republican taste were tangled up with consumption. After all, women’s public presence was articulated through images, objects, texts, and performances that simultaneously connected them to republican refinement and to luxurious consumption—connections made all the more potent by the resemblances between students and the art they created.
Academies gave life to the American republic of taste. These institutions valorized taste as a crucial component of republican manners and genteel subjectivity. Just as important, they concretized it. Academy students learned to recognize beauty in texts, images, and objects. They learned that taste was realized in their posture and their penmanship; it was expressed in their belletristic essays and elegant embroidered pictures. The curricula and culture of early national academies helped ensure that students experienced taste as a way of being in the world and not merely as a philosophical abstraction. And by cultivating an appreciation for taste, academies also helped create a market for it. Young men and women left academies with identities and subjectivities that had been deeply influenced by their aesthetic, aestheticized educations. Certain that their taste signified national and personal merit, these students-turned-citizens retained the habits and appetites that their instructors had worked so hard to impart. They continued to want and need objects and images on which they could exercise their taste. They sought out cultural spaces where they could perform their taste alongside others. Stepping outside the academy and into the larger world, students encountered growing numbers of aesthetic entrepreneurs, eager to make a living off of the appetite for taste.
CHAPTER TWO
Aesthetic Entrepreneurs
In the spring of 1806, Ethan Allen Greenwood traveled from New York City to Hanover, New Hampshire, for his final term at Dartmouth College. Like so many of his peers, Greenwood’s years at college had been interrupted by stints teaching at regional academies in order to earn money for his own education. And like so many of his ambitious peers, he anticipated a career in law. But Greenwood was also an aspiring painter and a voracious consumer of culture, and culture was the purpose of the winter he had just spent in New York. While he was in the city, he read a “great deal.” He frequented the theater, where he saw Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, School for Scandal, and a production of Hamlet starring Thomas Apthorpe Cooper, one of the most acclaimed actors on the American stage. He went to see the nation’s largest pipe organ before it was shipped to a church in Philadelphia. He attended a variety of churches and visited the New York Academy of the Fine Arts. But mostly Ethan Allen Greenwood painted. He had arranged to study with the celebrated artist Edward Savage, best known now for the painting The Washington Family. Strapped for cash, Greenwood offset the cost of his training by offering drawing and painting lessons to Savage’s daughters. By the end of his tenure with Savage, he had painted copies of ten portraits “among which was Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, head of Washington, & [Gilbert] Stuarts full length of Washington, Cleopatra & others” in addition to “painting my own likeness.”
Back in New Hampshire, Greenwood determined to make a name for himself by turning the fruits of his New York stay into an exhibition. He displayed the portraits he had painted alongside the prints he had purchased in his college rooms and invited all of Dartmouth to admire his accomplishments. To Greenwood’s delight, “the government of [the] college, their families, & some other ladies called … to see my pictures” and several of the “ladies” stayed on to have their profiles taken. That April day, the college student became newly visible to Hanover’s better sort. But he also became visible in new ways—as a painter who could render a likeness, as a connoisseur whose taste could compel and instruct, and as a painted face, as the object of others’ discerning looks.1 The memory of that heady afternoon may well have stuck in Greenwood’s mind, for by 1813 he was ready to turn his back on the law and declare that his “attention now will be given strictly to painting.” He spent the following five years painting hundreds of portraits; purchasing prints, books, and statuary at auctions; and looking—at art, at curiosities, at entertainments. In 1818, he bought the contents of Edward Savage’s museum in order to form the core of his New England Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened its doors in Boston on July 4.2 Launching a career as a museum proprietor at the age of thirty-nine, Ethan Allen Greenwood had finally realized the promise of his college exhibition.
To a large extent, the American republic of taste depended on the efforts of individuals like Greenwood. As producers and impresarios, proprietors and teachers, their unlikely careers contributed much to the efflorescence of aesthetic
