Paid work was supposed to find them, and then only in emergencies, occasioned by, say, the death of a father or the financial reverses of a husband. Not surprisingly, the extant letters and diaries written by female artists and the biographies written about them during the nineteenth century have nothing to say about how, or even whether, they consciously chose to commence their careers. Particular women may have experienced an awakening of ambition and a hunger for distinction. Yet in their personal writing and in the few accounts written about them, their initial aspirations are either subsumed within household strategies or presented as fait accompli.10
There was thus no single path to this unconventional vocation. Family connections surely steered some women and men toward careers as painters. Charles Willson Peale famously named a number of his children after eminent artists and did everything in his power to push them into the family business. So, too, did Cephas Thompson, a self-taught portrait painter from Massachusetts, whose children Cephas Giovanni Thompson and Marietta Angelica Thompson supported themselves as artists. Kin could serve as examples, teachers, and partners. Family connections may have been especially helpful for female artists, whose access to training, travel, and patronage was markedly constrained.11 Academies, which provided students with a stylistic vocabulary along with at least rudimentary training in drawing, could also serve as a bridge to a career in art. Even a college education seems to have provided a small handful of very privileged young men with the opportunity to enhance their training. Although John Trumbull’s father sent him to Harvard in hopes of squelching his artistic ambitions, the teenager seized the opportunity to scour the college library for engraved prints and treatises on painting and perspective; Samuel F. B. Morse began painting in earnest while he was studying at Yale.12
The trades provided a far larger number of men with the skills necessary to take up painting. Ezra Ames, for example, painted coaches in Albany before he painted likenesses of the state’s legislators. Chair making and sign painting provided an initial entrée to painting for Chester Harding, who eventually attained both fame and wealth, and his brother Horace, who did not.13 Many of the men who became portrait painters moved back and forth between art and artisanship as business dictated. Every city boasted tradesmen-turned-painters “who would occasionally work at any thing,” sniffed John Wesley Jarvis, who had the good fortune to launch his career with an apprenticeship in Edward Savage’s studio.14
Serendipity played no small role in the choices of many. Men who suffered from chronic ill health, like Joseph Steward and Eliab Metcalf, turned to art only after deciding that it was a profession suited to those with “impaired health and debilitated frame[s].”15 John Vanderlyn began to discover his vocation as a consequence of clerking for Thomas Barrow, New York City’s “only dealer in good prints.” Henry Inman’s “early delights were concerned with pictures,” but his aspirations took flight when he read Madame de Genlis’s Tales of the Castle, a children’s anthology that included biographical sketches of famous painters and sculptors.16 A chance encounter with a children’s book, a lucky clerkship, a bout of poor health: These random circumstances were as likely to steer a person toward a career in art as an analogous apprenticeship or formal education.
Learning to Paint
However one acquired the desire to paint, obtaining the requisite training was notoriously difficult.17 Anglo-American artists worked at a remove from the protocols that dominated European and especially English painting, and had—at best—limited access to formal studio training. Would-be American artists had to do more than learn to paint. They also had to invent that training that would teach them to do so. When Maryland saddler Charles Willson Peale decided to try his hand at painting in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, he quickly realized that “he had seen very few paintings of any kind, and as to the preparations and methods of using colours, he was totally ignorant of them.” Although he could jerry-rig a palette and easel at home, he had to travel to Philadelphia for paint. When he arrived at the “colour shop,” he realized that he was “at a loss to know what to purchase, for he only knew the names of such colours, as are most commonly known.” Ever resourceful, Peale went straight to James Rivington’s bookstore, where he picked up a copy of Robert Dossie’s Handmaid to the Arts. After four days of study, he returned to the shop prepared to purchase the paints with which to launch his new career. For the next several years, he simultaneously painted portraits up and down the Atlantic seaboard and immersed himself in the work produced and collected by men like John Hesselius, John Singleton Copley, and John Smibert. By 1767, he had progressed enough that some of his Maryland patrons raised the money to send him to London for “close study” with Benjamin West, by then the director of the Society of Artists. When he returned to Maryland two years later, Peale had acquired skills in oil and watercolor painting, sculpture, and mezzotint engraving; he had mastered full-length portraits and ivory miniatures.18
An aspiring artist in the early republic would have faced challenges not much different than the ones Peale overcame a half-century earlier. Indeed, one rationale for establishing early national art academies like the Columbianum (1794), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805), and the New York Academy of the Fine Arts, later renamed the American Academy of the Fine Arts (1802), was to provide young artists with the sort of streamlined, systematic training that Peale, Dunlap, Trumbull, and others had enjoyed in London, courtesy of Benjamin West and the Royal Academy. Yet American artists never succeeded in establishing such an institution, not least because they disagreed bitterly about whether and how an academy modeled after a hierarchical organization tied to a royal court could meet the needs of a republic. As a consequence, through the first decades of the nineteenth century, men and women who wanted to learn to paint well enough to live by their brushes pursued strategies that recalled Peale’s haphazard early training.
Learning to draw was only the beginning. Color posed daunting challenges. Before ready-ground pigments first became available in the 1830s, artists had to mix their own paints. Coming up with “receipts” that delivered consistent, long-lasting color in a form that was easy to work with was an ongoing concern, even for painters like Copley, Peale, and Washington Allston, who had considerable technical skills.19 Then there was the question of application: How could painters learn to combine multiple colors—to say nothing of underpainting, toning, varnishing, and glazing—in order to reproduce what they saw in the world around them, much less the stylistic conventions of other paintings? Painters snatched up studio training when and where they could. But the kind of sustained study that Greenwood enjoyed with Savage during the winter of 1806 was elusive. Established painters were not always interested in taking students. Gilbert Stuart, for one, was willing to dispense snippets of advice to a long list of early national painters, but he extended formal studio training to a very select few. Painters like Savage and his pupil John Wesley Jarvis, who were willing to offer systematic training, were only accessible in eastern cities.20 In the absence of formal training, loose-knit networks of like-minded individuals provided one avenue for sharing technical information. Most of these exchanges unfolded in informal, catch-as-catch-can conversations, but some took the form of correspondence. The canonical John Singleton Copley and the obscure Mary Way, for example, both wrote letters to their painter siblings in which they detailed long bouts of trial and error at the easel and suggested solutions to technical problems ranging from manufacturing paint to lighting a sitter.21
Even artists with considerable formal training found that the acquisition of basic technique could be a lifelong process. Dunlap, who trained with West, supported himself more or less successfully as a miniaturist for months in western New York and Boston despite being ignorant “even in the knowledge necessary to prepare ivory for the reception of color.” The deficiency was only corrected when Edward Malbone learned about Dunlap’s methods while the two were chatting at a dinner party. Malbone took pity and, reeling from a champagne hangover the next morning, walked Dunlap through the process.22
However a painter acquired discrete skills, he or she needed to incorporate them into a finished picture that conformed to established standards and conventions. Thus, painters sought out opportunities to copy
