of what he perceived and provided a forum for exercising his taste. Greenwood’s habits of looking and recording paid off: By 1821, the young man who had once hoped to “be improved” by Boston’s State House pictures could pick out the “good heads” in the Shakespeare Gallery and dismiss the rest as “gaudy trash.” He could commend the “elegance of arrangements & nature of the articles” in Scudder’s museum and regret that there was so very little at the American Academy of the Fine Arts to afford “entertainment or improvement.” By the time the journals end, in 1825, Ethan Allen Greenwood had become a connoisseur.44
If Greenwood’s journal gestures toward the central role that looking played in artistic self-fashioning, William Dunlap’s autobiography, published as part of his monumental History, expounds on it. The multivolume History unfolds mostly as a chronologically organized biographical compendium. Over the course of thirty chapters, he plumbs the lives of American artists, native born and otherwise, for insights about national character analogous to those that could be found in biographical compendia celebrating the nation’s founders. As he explains to readers in the book’s introduction, just as readers “earnestly desire to know every particular relative to the first settlers who raised the standard of civilization in the wilderness,” so, too, did they want to learn about the artists “who raised and who supported the standard of taste, and decorated the social column with its Corinthian capital.”45 Accordingly, the first volume of the History begins with colonial migrants like John Smibert and Robert Feke, picks up speed with Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, and assumes a distinctly national character with the ascendance of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and Dunlap himself.
Dunlap made no apologies for including himself in this pantheon and no apologies for taking up so many pages in it. His account of his own life is longer than his treatment of either Benjamin West or Gilbert Stuart and about the same as his coverage of Thomas Sully and Washington Allston combined. Dunlap began the History when he found himself in poor health and worse financial straits; his diary entries for the year leading up to the publication of his history of American art are a dismal catalog of diarrhea, laxatives, laudanum, and dwindling bank balances. Old and infirm, Dunlap may well have felt compelled to validate a career that had secured him neither economic stability nor public adulation.46
Why Dunlap chose to place his life story at the center of American art history matters less than how he told that story. In the History, he cast his life as an instructive flop. Where the lives of West, Copley, Trumbull, and Allston could help train up a young painter in the way he should go, Dunlap’s own conduct “stood as a beacon to be avoided by all.”47 He readily admitted that his was a failure of discipline, maturity, and nerve. But in the autobiography, Dunlap depicts these shortcomings as a failure of vision. The capacity for a certain kind of sight, he insisted, was the precondition for the creation and appreciation of art. It was also the quality that he himself most lacked.
Before Dunlap wrote about his problem, he painted it. He depicted his compromised vision in two miniature self-portraits, painted in 1805 and in 1812, years that saw him returning to art after failed stints in the theater. Both likenesses are dominated by the artist’s depiction of his eyes. The left eye is large, dark, and alert, whether it looks off into the distance or over his shoulder at the viewer. The right eye, blind as the result of a childhood accident, is clouded over. There is no iris, no pupil, and no mistaking this eye’s blindness. The absence of color signals the absence of sight. These portraits become more suggestive when paired against the portrait of Dunlap painted by Charles Cromwell Ingham for the National Academy of Design in 1838. Ingham’s likeness repeats the poses Dunlap had used on the miniatures. But in Ingham’s portrait, both eyes are large, dark, and apparently focused, as though reading. Ingham’s portrayal suggests that although Dunlap may have been blind in one eye, his appearance did not immediately announce the fact to observers who did not know him. Yet the inability to see mattered enough to Dunlap that he rendered it visible.
Figure 11. William Dunlap, self-portrait, ca. 1812. Watercolor on ivory, 3 × 2½ in. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of the Estate of Geraldine Woolsey Carmalt 1968.12.1.
Dunlap’s autobiography spells out what his early self-portraits imply. He returns repeatedly to sight in his account of his early years and his decision to become a painter, which occupies the first third of the narrative. The only child of “indulgent” parents, he received “no education in the usual acceptation of the word.” His boyhood schooling was interrupted first by war and then by injury. The latter interruption was the one that mattered: While playing outside with a group of boys who were pitching wood chips at one another, Dunlap was hit in the face and his right eye was “cut longitudinally.” “Weeks of confinement to my bed and more to my house” sufficed to restore his health, he recalled, but he never regained “the sight of the organ” (244, 250). During his convalescence and after, Dunlap developed a taste for drawing. By the time he recovered, his copies of engraved prints borrowed from the neighbors “might almost pass” for the originals.
Figure 12. Charles Cromwell Ingham, William Dunlap, 1838–1839. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. Courtesy of the National Academy Museum.
Encouraged by the admiration these drawings solicited, Dunlap settled on painting as his profession. The war made it difficult to secure a regular teacher, so he resolved to learn by doing. He painted his father first, moved on to other relatives, and when he had exhausted his supply of family, he turned to his friends. The moment he began to get applications from strangers, he “fixed [his] price as three guineas a-head” and “thus commenced portrait-painter in the year 1782” (250–251). To be sure, this was something less than a serious bid at a livelihood. “Living as the only and indulged child of my parents” removed the pressure of subsistence, he explained. But Dunlap’s efforts were promising enough that by 1784, his father was willing to send him to London to study with Benjamin West.
West did his best by Dunlap. He confirmed the young man’s talent on the basis of his “specimens”; helped him secure cheap lodgings with Robert Davy, a portraitist and art teacher; loaned him plaster casts to draw; and secured his admission to the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, as Dunlap explained, a trip that should have gone a long way toward securing his future career as an artist proved a fiasco. Hours that should have been spent in the studio were wiled away in drinking, dining, and then drinking some more. Entire weeks were dissolved into visits to the theater and pleasure trips into the countryside. Dunlap abandoned Davy’s rooms (and Davy’s tutelage) for more fashionable quarters and took up with a group of “half-pay officers” fresh from America who congregated at a local porterhouse (257–262). He never studied at the academy and although he was a regular guest at West’s dinner table, he managed to avoid his purported teacher’s studio almost entirely. He completed a few paintings—portraits and historical pieces—but saw little progress. This “life of unprofitable idleness” came to an abrupt end in 1787 when his father heard about his antics and summoned him home (265–266).
Looking back on what he judged a misspent youth, Dunlap found much to regret. And as he considered his failure, he returned time and again to his inability to see the world with a painter’s eye. Color posed the most fundamental obstacle. Because he taught himself to draw by copying engraved prints in ink, Dunlap worried that his “eye became satisfied with light and shadow” and learned to care little for “the excitement of colour.” He imagined that early intervention in the form of a knowledgeable teacher might have helped him to overcome this hurdle. But that was all in the realm of the hypothetical. Whether “from nature,” or injury, or training, he “did not possess a painter’s eye for colour” (250).
Unfortunately, his experiences in England only confirmed a shortsightedness that should have been apparent before he left New York. The nadir came
