When actual paintings were out of reach, artists looked to engraved prints as guides for composition and templates for future work. Thus Dunlap and Sargent spent hours as teenagers copying mezzotints of Copley’s renowned “shark painting.”23
If ambition, finances, and luck aligned, an American artist’s training culminated on the other side of the Atlantic. London was the most common destination, not least because of Benjamin West, who helped train three generations of American painters. But occasionally Americans like John Vanderlyn made their way as far as Italy or France. Access to European training obviously varied greatly. For Dunlap, blessed with an indulgent father who was a successful merchant, or Trumbull, possessed of impeccable social and political connections, European training was relatively easy to acquire. But it was not beyond the reach of the self-taught Harding, whose impoverished father had been more interested in devising a perpetual motion machine than in procuring “bread and butter” for “his hungry children.” To be sure, Harding had to postpone the trip until he had saved enough to support his family and himself while he was abroad; he sailed for England as a means of enhancing an already successful career, not launching one. Nevertheless, shortly after he turned thirty, Harding, a former chair maker and sign painter, walked into Britain’s Royal Academy to view one of Raphael’s original cartoons.24
Predictably, women had a far more difficult time making their way through every step of this fragmented trajectory. The most privileged and talented were stymied in their attempts to advance beyond the skills taught at academies and seminaries. When the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced its first annual exhibition in 1810, President Francis Hopkinson grandly invited women to participate. “I hope and trust the walls of our academy will soon be decorated with products of female genius; and that no means will be omitted to invite and encourage them,” he told the academy’s board of directors. Despite the Pennsylvania Academy’s endorsement of “female genius,” only three of the hundreds of pieces included in the exhibition were produced by women. Two of those women were members of the extended Peale family.25
Training, rather than genius, was to blame. The proficiency required of an academy-approved artist was simply beyond the reach of most female painters. Formal studio training with an established artist was all but impossible for a woman to obtain, unless—like Anna Claypoole Peale, Maria Peale, Rosalie Sully, or Marietta Angelica Thompson—she could receive it from a male relative. Instead, aspiring female painters fell back on lessons from itinerant teachers. Miniaturist Sarah Goodridge, for example, who became successful in the 1830s, benefited from Gilbert Stuart’s criticism and encouragement, but she received her extremely limited formal training from an unknown painter from Hartford, Connecticut, who briefly offered lessons in Boston. European study was out of the question for women. Consider Anne Hall, the daughter of a “physician of eminence” who enthusiastically encouraged her talent, albeit within the parameters dictated by gender conventions. Hall’s father made sure that she had top-notch supplies and her brother, a wealthy New York real estate developer, sent her paintings that he purchased during his European travel. Knowing that she would need more training than she could hope to glean in Pomfret, Connecticut, her father arranged for her to travel. But where an affluent father sympathetic to his son’s ambitions simply dispatched him to London, Dr. Hall sent Anne first to Rhode Island, to visit friends and to take lessons from Samuel King, Gilbert Stuart’s first teacher, and then to New York City, to live with her brother and study with the noted Alexander Robertson.26 Despite her many advantages, Hall painted in a world constrained by gender.
Print culture helped painters compensate for spotty formal, institutionalized training. Technical manuals, aesthetic treatises, and illustrated books and magazines increased in both number and variety in the years following the Revolution. These texts, both imported and domestic, promised to train painters who were affluent and laboring, urban and provincial, male and female. Drawing and painting manuals, especially, aimed to provide introductory, sequential training, showing reader-artists how to see by providing them with a schemata, a series of formulas for representing figures and landscapes in accord with conventions stretching back to the Renaissance.27
As the nineteenth century progressed, manuals became more systematic. Carington Bowles’s The Artist’s Assistant, an English text reprinted in Philadelphia in 1794, advised students to begin by copying “the several features of the human face”—eyes, nose, and mouth, borrowed from Charles Le Brun’s drawings—which were included in the book before progressing to outlining profiles, full faces, and figures. By the 1830s, Rembrandt Peale’s Graphics insisted that anyone could learn to draw. “Try” was spelled out across the bottom of the book’s title page; subsequent editions added the promise that “Nothing is denied to well-directed Industry.” Assuming that his readers might never have seen an actual painter at work, Peale began by explaining how to hold a pencil and position oneself in front of an easel. He proceeded through penmanship, lines, and geometric shapes before showing readers how to identify the angles that gave shape to, say, a human nose.28
The market for such books was partly, perhaps mostly, fueled by growing numbers of amateurs, keen to acquire the kind of polite and useful art offered in academies. But the boundary separating amateur and vocational training was porous at best. Would-be professionals benefited from many of the same texts that were sold to amateurs. Archibald Robertson pitched his drawing and painting manuals, like his school, at amateurs and professionals alike. And when teenaged William Dunlap took painting lessons from William Williams as a means of mastering his craft, he was surprised when his teacher presented him with a drawing book “such as I had possessed for years.”29 One man’s preprofessional textbook was another’s leisure reading.
Manuals were useful for more than teaching a reader how to depict forms on paper or canvas. They borrowed heavily from the Anglo-American aesthetic canon to weigh in on what kinds of forms displayed the finest taste and why. Thus Robertson’s Elements of the Graphic Arts included essays on the “Theory of Painting” and the “Picturesque and the Beautiful” as well as instructions for schematizing the human profile as a series of triangles.30 Painting and drawing books surely compensated for the absence of flesh-and-blood instructors and paucity of academic training. But they also composed yet another strand in a wide-ranging discourse on taste. They grounded painters in a shared set of aesthetic principles. Manuals thus helped distill taste into technique. In so doing, they worked to align the sensibilities and expectations of artists and patrons.
The Artist’s Eye
Mastering the manual skills and the technical knowledge that painting demanded was no small matter; the obstacles were considerable. Yet, when we read early national artists’ diaries, memoirs, and letters, it is striking how little they have to say about the acquisition of technique (exercised by the hand) and how much they have to say about the acquisition of taste (manifested in a good eye). In the narratives they spun about themselves, the difficulties of learning to treat canvas or ivory, to mix colors, to paint are eclipsed by the challenges and rewards of learning to see. Never mind that all their painstakingly acquired training took aim at both their eyes and their hands. In their telling, the process of becoming a painter was dominated by vision, yoked to intellect and imagination.
This emphasis, which amounted to a rhetorical dematerialization of the practice of painting, served to locate artists’ work in the realm of the “liberal” rather than the “mechanical” arts. It recapitulated the venerable, transatlantic hierarchies that were rooted in writings by the Earl of Shaftesbury, popularized in any number of encyclopedias and treatises on art, reinforced in belles lettres, and painstakingly copied into the commonplace books of academy students. As one authority, writing for an American encyclopedia, put it, the “noble” and “ingenious” liberal arts (which included painting, poetry, and music) depend more on the “labour of the mind that on that of the hand.” The “mechanical arts” (which included the “trades and manufactures” like weaving, clock making, carpentry, and printing) depended on “the hand and body” more than the mind. Or, in the words of Connecticut miniaturist Betsey Way Champlain,
