men and women whose appetites for taste had been whetted by an academy stint. Perhaps more important, they helped extend that appetite to people whose fortunes or life courses ruled out the kind of formal aesthetic education promoted within academies. Their success depended on their ability to surmount a series of challenges and hone a battery of seemingly unrelated skills.3
Ethan Allen Greenwood offers a case in point. Before he could begin to imagine a vocation in the arts, he had to acquire a painter’s technical, manual skills. In addition to training his hands, he needed to train his eye, to cultivate an intuitive appreciation for the beautiful, the curious, the instructive. He needed to know, immediately, what kinds of images and objects would appeal to his patrons’ tastes. He also needed to convince them that he was as good with his eyes as he was with his brush: As a portrait painter, he needed to be able to seize on the traits that would render sitters’ character visible on canvas; as a museum owner, he was responsible for curating the exhibits that would entertain visitors’ eyes. Skill and taste, however, were not sufficient. Turning portraits and exhibits into cash required both the careful management of existing markets and cultivation of new ones. Success as a portrait painter and museum keeper demanded that Ethan Allen Greenwood become an aesthetic entrepreneur.
To describe Greenwood and his peers as aesthetic entrepreneurs is to capture the dual elements of their careers, to situate their lives in the history of looking as well as in the history of laboring and commerce.4 On the one hand, Greenwood was simultaneously a product of the period’s deep preoccupation with taste and a promoter of its rich visual culture. His career as a portrait painter and museum proprietor was made possible by a society that had embraced the sort of aesthetic precepts promoted by academies and seminaries. He found his clientele among a generation of women and men who were adamant about the cultural and political importance of taste, even if they were sometimes vague on its qualifying characteristics. Greenwood’s patrons literally looked for new objects and spectacles upon which to exercise their taste just as they looked to print culture and educational institutions to legitimate it. Indeed, it was precisely this growing market for taste, manifested in multiple forms, that enabled many men (and more than a few women) to seek out careers as painters, art teachers, museum proprietors, or critics. This preoccupation with taste and visuality did more than expand consumer markets and open up employment opportunities. It also stood at the center of artists’ self-fashioning. Artists of varying ability and success understood that they transformed the abstractions of taste into tangible objects and images. They defined themselves in terms that qualified them for inclusion in the republic of taste.
On the other hand, emissaries of taste were also makers and sellers of commodities. If artists had one foot in the republic of taste, the other was lodged squarely in the marketplace. They worked with their hands as well as their eyes in order to master the technical skills that could make taste visible. They made and sold paintings, portraits mainly. Artists, in other words, made and sold luxury goods. And the demand for luxury goods proved vulnerable to the slightest economic fluctuations. Operating in a sector of the economy that was unstable even by the standards of the day, aesthetic entrepreneurs had no choice but to sharpen their business skills and expand their markets. In the process, they and their patrons acquired new kinds of visibility within the early republic.
Finding a Vocation
Near the end of his long and remarkable career, Charles Willson Peale disputed the “generally adopted opinion” that “Ginius for the fine arts, is a particular gift, and not an acquirement. That Poets, Painters, &c are born such.” A decade later, in 1834, the painter-turned-art-historian William Dunlap poked fun at apocryphal stories about the painter whose genius drove him to “scrawl, scratch, pencil, or paint as soon as he could hold anything wherewith he could make a mark.”5 From the artists’ perspective, the problem with these hoary celebrations of genius was the way they ignored both the contingency that led to a career in the arts and the laborious training necessary to produce proficiency. Greatness, as Peale and Dunlap well knew, was not foreordained. From the historian’s perspective, the problem with these narratives is that they work backward. Beginning with the polished work of a master painter, they seek evidence for its origins in the artist’s biography. The clichéd stories derided by Peale and Dunlap are premised on the distance that separates canonical painters at the apex of their careers from the ranks of mere practitioners. That seemingly insurmountable gulf is then projected back in time, to the moment when training began, when “giniuses” and practitioners alike were novices. Reversing this perspective (and setting aside questions about a painter’s eventual greatness) affords a far clearer understanding of the cultural and economic environments that enabled men like Peale, Dunlap, or Greenwood to forge careers as aesthetic entrepreneurs.
Painting was not an obvious vocation in the early republic. Academies and seminaries may have valorized taste and pushed male and female students to develop an eye for art, but they stopped well short of encouraging them to make a living by it. Men from the middling and upper classes found that the decision to make a living by painting, much like the decision to make a living by writing, was potentially suspect. The choice was well outside the conventions of masculine respectability. Landed wealth, commerce, the learned professions: These were the respectable ways for men to acquire and maintain property; the property thus accumulated was meant to culminate in disinterested civic service (in the eighteenth-century imagination) and partisan political engagement (in the nineteenth-century imagination). The arts, in contrast, were suitable for leisured contemplation and criticism or, at most, for dabbling. This ideal was hardly an easy fit for men whose talents and inclinations drew them toward careers in the arts.6
If painting was not a secure source of masculine identity, neither was it a secure form of financial support, as the fathers of many aspiring painters pointed out. Indeed, accounts of early national painters’ lives echo with anecdotes about young men from propertied families who turned to art despite the objections raised by their fathers. In his 1841 autobiography, John Trumbull recalled his father’s persistent attempts to push him into the law, widely heralded as “the profession which in a republic leads to all emolument and distinction.” Dismissing his son’s fantasies about the “honors paid to artists in the glorious days of Greece and Athens,” the former governor drily observed that “Connecticut is not Athens.”7 Indeed, the decision to paint is regularly depicted as a rebellion against patriarchal authority in History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), William Dunlap’s monumental survey of the careers of American artists. Henry Sargent’s “irresistible” desire to paint “deranged or interrupted the sober avocations of mercantile life” that his father, an eminent merchant, had planned for him. Thomas Sully’s father, a theater manager, initially placed him with an insurance broker who returned the boy in short order, complaining that although he “was very industrious in multiplying figures, they were figures of men and women.” Only then could Sully persuade his father to apprentice him to a French portrait painter. Lawyer-turned-miniaturist Charles Fraser, orphaned at the age of nine, desperately wanted to pursue a career as an artist. But his guardians “did not yield to his desire for instruction in that art,” Dunlap wrote, speculating that they feared committing the boy to a future some “might deem less certain” than the learned professions.
Such concerns were not limited to families that might reasonably expect to situate their sons as merchants or lawyers. Even Joseph Wood’s father, who was merely a “respectable farmer” from Orange County, New York, expected the boy to follow in his footsteps.8 Aspiring painters whose fathers were artisans or farmers not yet touched by the Village Enlightenment could also encounter the disapproval of older generations. Chester Harding, for one, recalled that his grandfather dismissed his career in terms that cast aspersions on both his honor and his manhood: The old man regarded it as “very little better than swindling to charge forty dollars for one of those effigies” and insisted that he “settle down on a farm, and become a respectable man.”9
The decision to paint professionally was, of course, least likely for women. Those who attended academies might have discovered aptitudes for drawing
