circle on a blank canvas, then touched in light and shadow with white and black chalk, leaving the canvas itself to show the “half-tint and reflexes.” Next he directed Dunlap to examine the patterns of light and shadow on a piece of statuary to observe how the theory worked in practice. To extend the lesson from black and white to a full range of color, West returned the young man to his own unfinished landscape, pointing out that the “masses of foliage … were painted on the same principle.” The lesson was humiliating. That West felt compelled to return his prodigal student to first principles was “perhaps proof of the little progress I had made in the art I professed to study.” Once again, Dunlap demonstrated that he had a “better eye for form than for color” and was “discouraged by finding that I did not perceive the beauty or effect of colors as others appeared to do” (258–259).
Whatever the cause of Dunlap’s poor eye for color, it quickly became a metaphor for his poor taste and poor judgment more generally. The aspiring artist was all but blind to the art that surrounded him in London. On his first visit to West’s London studio, Dunlap remembered passing through a long gallery “hung with sketches and designs” that opened into a high-ceilinged room filled with “gigantic paintings” before entering the studio proper. “I gazed, with all the wonder of ignorance and the enthusiasm of youth upon the paintings,” he recalled. There was no overcoming this well-intentioned gawking. Despite living amidst “wonders of art,” he remained “blind as a savage.” In and around London, he “looked upon pictures without the necessary knowledge that would have made them instructive” (256). On an expedition to Burghley House, whose grounds had been designed by the picturesque landscape architect Capability Brown and whose rooms housed more than five hundred paintings, Dunlap took in pictures of “Madonnas and Bambinos, and Magdalens and Cruxifictions,” which “did not advance me one step” (263). The dazzling collection of the Duke of Marlborough offered “some pleasure” but “little profit.” After three years of this futile looking, his father summoned him home to New York. There, he was greeted by his father’s slaves, whose “black faces, white teeth, and staring eyes” held up a mirror to Dunlap’s own failure of vision (266). Despite the finest opportunities money could buy, William Dunlap returned little changed from the youth who had once “admired [Charles Willson] Peale’s gallery of pictures” simply because his ignorance led him “to admire every thing” (251).
Chester Harding succeeded where William Dunlap failed, and against far longer odds. Born into a rural New England household that lacked money, education, and pedigree, Harding had looked to the military, tavern keeping, and chair making for his livelihood before he learned to paint. He began with signs and moved on to portraits. Eventually, as his skill and reputation increased, he became one of the most successful academic-style portraitists working in the antebellum North.48 Harding told the story of his remarkable rise twice. He wrote the best-known version, My Egotistigraphy, in 1865, near the end of his life, at the behest of his children and friends. Harding tells his life story in the first half of the memoir; in the book’s second half, letters and diary entries piece together his travels through Europe.
The Harding who comes to life in the first half of the Egotistigraphy is the one everyone remembers, and with good reason. This Harding is as unpretentious as he is funny. He gets rich but never forgets his humble beginnings. He pokes good-natured fun at his clients’ airs even as he values their trade. His is a workaday account of how he learned to paint and how he turned his genuine love of the practice into a lucrative career. There are no high-falutin’ claims to genius, no paeans to taste. Indeed, those two words are all but absent from the first half of the memoir, although they turn up often enough in the diaries that Harding kept while he was abroad.49
To be sure, Harding was alive to the magic of a good likeness. He began to paint portraits after becoming “enamored” with the second-rate efforts of an itinerant he hired to paint him and his wife. The prospect of painting consumed him; he “thought of it by day and dreamed of it by night.” And when Harding made his own stab at a portrait, a picture of his wife, he “became frantic with delight; it was like the discovery of a new sense I could think of nothing else.”50 But his growing ambition, an ambition first articulated as the desire to become a painter and then as the desire to become a fine one, was realized by doing. Success was the culmination of hard work, endless practice, and close attention to the technical demands of his craft. Success was also the product of business acumen, including the real estate investments that helped support his family while he worked as an itinerant. Harding measured his progress by the rising profits he could demand from an increasingly genteel clientele. In the first half of My Egotistigraphy, Harding sketches the artist as a self-made everyman.51
Some thirty years before his family coaxed the Egotistigraphy out of him, Harding told his story differently. In a long letter written for inclusion in Dunlap’s History, Harding recounted his transformation from sign painter to portrait painter in terms that drew sharp distinctions between painting signs (“a useful art,” “a vocation”) and painting faces (a “profession,” an “honourable” profession, a “newly discovered goddess”). In the narrative he produced for Dunlap, Harding traveled constantly not to earn money but to educate his eyes. He went from Kentucky to Philadelphia in order to spend “five or six weeks in looking at the portraits of Mr. Sully and others”; a few years later, a trip to Boston was “chiefly … a pilgrimage to Stuart.” Trips to the East Coast were intended to hone his eye rather than his technique. Visual acuity naturally resulted in technical acuity.52
Harding took pains to define himself as a “self-taught” artist in ways that removed his work and, by extension, himself from the ranks of mere craftsmen. Speculating on the success he enjoyed in Boston in the 1820s, when he claimed to have attracted more sitters than Gilbert Stuart, he considered the possibility that affluent patrons were attracted by the novelty of sitting for a painter who was a “backwoodsman, newly caught.” Patrons and “superficial observers,” he concluded, invested the phrase “self-taught artist” with misplaced cachet. More knowledgeable judges, he sniffed, understood the label as a symbol of labor, signaling “no other virtue … than that of perseverance.” But for his part, Harding used the term only to indicate that he did not have “any particular instructor”; he did not owe his success to the tutelage of a Benjamin West or an Edward Savage.53 Sidestepping the manual labor suggested by “perseverance,” he explained, “It matters little how an artist arrives at a sort of midway elevation, at which all with common industry may arrive.” What counted was genius, which enabled someone like himself to soar “above the common level,” leaving “his less favoured brethren to follow in his track with mingled feelings of envy and admiration.”54
Harding realized his genius not as an itinerant canvassing the American frontier, but as an explorer surveying a “wilderness of art” in London. At first, he confessed, the overwhelming number and variety of paintings dulled his senses, making him “indifferent to all the sublime works that were within my reach.” Still, he persisted in looking and “by degrees” began to “see new beauties every day” in the Old Masters. Just as his eyes began to open, his money began to run out. He fell back on portraiture to support himself and immediately attracted a devoted and aristocratic clientele. His sitters provided much more than cash; they ushered him into a world of exquisite taste and sumptuous art collections. Noble patrons invited him to spend weeks at the “splendid” Hamilton Palace, seat of the Duke of Hamilton and home to one of the finest picture galleries in Great Britain. They enabled him to visit Holkham Hall, a seat of “luxury and elegance” belonging to the Coke family. There, he told Dunlap, his mornings “were chiefly spent looking at the ‘old masters,’” his afternoons in hunting wild game, and his evenings benefiting from the dinner conversation of the aristocrats, politicians, and artists who were congregated around the seventy-year-old Lord Coke and Coke’s twenty-one-year-old wife. For readers of the History, Harding cast the time spent at England’s magnificent country houses as leisurely opportunities to soak up art, taste, and what he called the “high life.”55
In fact,
