a letter of introduction from the Duke of Sussex, because the family was “constantly annoyed” by inquiries from vendors and tradesmen of all sorts. During the two weeks he spent at Holkham Hall, he painted four portraits, including a “kit-cat”-sized likeness of “Mr. Blakie, Mr. Coke’s Steward.” A working artist, he was constantly at his easel. His status was confirmed in the Holkham Hall account books, which list him as a “limner.”56
Harding’s inflated account of the time he spent in England was a savvy business strategy. His immersion in the world of Old Masters and tasteful aristocrats was calculated to enhance his American reputation. It seems to have worked. In the coda Dunlap added to Harding’s “frank and manly” letter, he took pains to celebrate the former “backwoodsman” as a gentleman, possessed of pleasing manners and appearance, who had purchased his “own beautiful country seat.” And he confirmed Harding’s account of himself with a personal recollection: Years earlier, Harding had called on Dunlap in his painting room, introduced himself, and provided “proof of a true eye and taste” by “immediately” picking out “the best head” Dunlap had set out for display. Together, Dunlap and Harding gave readers a portrait of the artist as a man defined by his eye and by his taste.57
Why did thirty years make such a difference in the way Harding told his story? In 1834, seven years after returning from Britain, he was solvent but hardly renowned. He was still rebuilding his network of Boston-based patrons and making a name for himself as a painter of statesmen in Washington, D.C. Naturally, he was keen to distance himself from his earlier, backwoods persona. With one eye trained on potential patrons and the other on fellow artists, the Harding of 1834 was bent on establishing his credentials as a man who warranted inclusion in the History not because of where he came from but because of what he had become. By 1865, Harding wrote for an audience of family and friends that included men of influence from New England to Washington, D.C. He counted John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Daniel Webster, John Marshall, and Bushrod Washington among his clients. Secure in his social, financial, and professional success, Harding could frame his life story as a distinctly American picaresque. Then, too, around midcentury many Americans had begun to turn away from romantic conceptions of the artist, endorsing instead the ideal of the artist as a hardheaded businessman. By 1865, the life story of an artist whose self-making depended on the work of his hands as much as his eyes and whose self-fashioning resulted as much from time spent in Paris, Kentucky, as time spent in Paris, France, had an appeal that it lacked in the 1830s. Both the 1834 narrative and the 1865 narrative depict an artist in the American grain. Placed side by side, they show us how much that grain had changed.58
Life Among the Connoisseurs
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