attention to pictures, turned entirely to England. West and Copley are
the only pre-Revolutionary Americans whose pictures possess any value.
The portraits of their predecessors—as, for instance, those in Memorial
Hall at Harvard—are stiff, hard, and expressionless. Then came Gilbert
Stuart at the end of the eighteenth century, whose portraits of George
and Martha Washington are famous, and who showed himself an artistic
genius and quite the equal of the great English portraitists. John
Trumbull, an officer in the Revolutionary Army, who lived at the same
time, was still more important for the national history by his war
pictures, the best of which were considerably above contemporary
productions. The historical wall-paintings which he made in 1817, for
the Capitol at Washington, are in his later and inferior manner. They
seem to-day, like everything which was done in the early part of the
century to decorate the Capitol, hackneyed and tiresome. And if one goes
from the Capitol to the Congressional Library, which shows the condition
of art at the end of the nineteenth century, one feels how far the
public taste of Trumbull’s time was from appreciating true art.
Portraiture was the only art which attained tolerable excellence, where,
besides Stuart, there were Peale, Wright, and Savage. Then came the day
of the “American Titian,” Allston, whose Biblical pictures were greatly
praised for their brilliant colouring.
Hitherto artists had gone to England to study or, indeed, sometimes to
Italy. In the second third of the century they went to Düsseldorf; they
painted American landscapes, American popular life, and historical
pictures of American heroes, all in German fashion. They delighted in
genre studies in the Düsseldorf manner, and painted the Hudson River all
bathed in German moonlight. While the popular school was still painting
the world in blackish brown, the artistic secession began at about the
time of the Civil War. Then artists began to go to Paris and Munich, and
American painting developed more freely. It was a time of earnest,
profound, and independent study such as had so far never been. The
artist learned to draw, learned to see values, and, in the end, to be
natural. The number of artists now began to increase, and to-day
Americans produce thousands of pictures each year, and one who sees the
European exhibitions in summer and the American in winter does not feel
that the latter are on a much lower level.
Since Allston’s time the leaders in landscape have been Cole, Bierstadt,
Kensett, and Gifford; in genre, Leslie, Woodville, and particularly
Mount; in historical painting, Lentze and White; and in portraiture,
Inman and Elliott. The first who preached the new doctrine of
individuality and colour was Hunt, and in the early seventies the new
school just graduated from Paris and Munich was bravely at work. There
are many well-known names in the last thirty years, and it is a matter
rather of individual choice what pictures one prefers of all the large
number. Yet no one would omit George Inness from the list, since he has
seen American landscapes more individually than any one else. Besides
his pictures every one knows the marines of Winslow Homer, the street
scenes of Childe Hassam, the heads of Eaton, the autumn forests of
Enneking, the apple trees in spring-time of Appleton Brown, the delicate
landscapes of Weir and Tryon, the wall pictures of Abbey, Cox, and Low,
Gaugengigl’s little figure paintings, Vedder’s ambitious symbolism, the
brilliant portraits of Cecilia Beaux and Chase, the women’s heads of
Tarbell, the ideal figures of Abbot Thayer, and the works of a hundred
other American artists, not to mention those who are really more
familiar in London, Paris, and Munich than in America itself.
Besides the oil pictures, there are excellent water-colours, pastelles,
and etchings; and, perhaps most characteristic of all, there is the
stained glass of La Farge, Lathrop, the late Mrs. Whitman, Goodhue, and
others. The workers in pen-and-ink are highly accomplished, of whom the
best known is Gibson, whose American women are not only artistic, but
have been socially influential on American ideals and manners. His
sketches for Life have been themselves models for real life. Nor should
we forget Pennell, the master of atmosphere in pen-and-ink.
Sculpture has developed more slowly. It presupposes a higher
understanding of art than does painting; and, besides that, the
prudishness of the Puritan has affected it adversely. When John Brazee,
the first American amateur sculptor, in the early part of the nineteenth
century, asked advice of the president of the New York Academy of Arts,
he was told that he would better wait a hundred years before practicing
sculpture in America. The speech admirably showed the general lack of
interest in plastic art. But the impetuous pressure toward
self-perfection existing in the nation shortened the century into
decades; people began to journey through Italy. The pioneers of
sculpture were Greenough, Powers, Crawford, and Palmer, and their
statues are still valued for their historical interest. The theatrical
genre groups of John Rogers became very popular; and Randolph Rogers,
who created the Columbus bronze doors of the Capitol, was really an
artist. Then came Storey, Ball, Rinehart, Hosmer, Mead, and many others
with works of greater maturity. Squares and public buildings were filled
with monuments and busts which, to be sure, were generally more
interesting politically than artistically, and which to-day wait
patiently for a charitable earthquake. And yet they show how the taste
for plastic art has slowly worked upward.
More recent movements, which are connected with the names of Ward,
Warner, Partridge, French, MacMonnies, and St. Gaudens, have already
left many beautiful examples of sculpture. Cities are jealously watchful
now that only real works of art shall be erected, and that monuments
which are to be seen by millions of people shall be really
characteristic examples of good art. More than anything else, sculpture
has at length come into a closer sympathy with architecture than perhaps
it has in any other country. The admirable sculptural decorations of the
Chicago World’s Fair, the effective Dewey Triumphal Arch and the
permanent plastic decorations of the Congressional Library, the more
restrained and distinguished decorations of the Court of Appeals in New
York City, and of many similar buildings show clearly that American
sculpture has ended its period of immaturity. Such a work as St.
Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial in Boston is among the most beautiful examples
of modern sculpture; and it is thoroughly American, not only because the
negro regiment marches behind the mounted colonel, but because the
American subject is handled in the American spirit. These men are
depicted with striking vigour, and the young hero riding to his death is
conceived with Puritan sobriety. Vigorous and mature is the American, in
plastic art as well as in poetry.
The development of architecture has been a very different one. A people
must be housed, and cannot stay out of doors until it has learned what
is beautiful in architecture. People could wait for poetry, music, and
painting while they were busy in keeping off the Indians and felling the
forests; but they had to have houses at once. And since at that time
they had no independent interests in art, they imitated forms with which
they had been familiar, and everywhere perpetuated the architectural
ideas of their mother country. But the builder is at a disadvantage
beside the painter, the singer, and the poet, in that when he imitates
he cannot even do that as he will, but is bound down by climate, by
social requirements, and especially by his building material. And when
he is placed in new surroundings, he is forced to strike out for
himself.
Although the American colonist remained under the influence of English
architecture, his environment forced him in the first place to build his
house of wood instead of stone as in England, and in wood he could not
so easily copy the pattern. It had to be a new variation of the older
art. And so architecture, although it more slavishly followed the mother
country than any other art, was the earliest to strike out in some
respects on an independent course. It borrowed its forms, but originated
their applications; and while it slowly adopted new ideas of style and
became gradually free of European styles, it became free even earlier in
their technical application, owing to the new American conditions. More
than any other feature of her civilization, American architecture
reveals the entire history of the people from the days when the Puritans
lived in little wooden villages to the present era of the sky-scraper of
the large cities; and in this growth more than in that of any other art
the whole country participates, and specially the West, with its
tremendous energy, which is awkward with the violin-bow and the crayon
but is well versed in piling stone on stone.
In colonial days, English renaissance architecture was imitated in wood,
a material which necessitated slender columns and called for finer
detail and more graceful lines than were possible in stone. One sees
to-day, especially in the New England States, many such buildings quite
unaltered; and the better of these in Salem, Cambridge, and Newport are,
in spite of their lightness, substantial and distinguished as no
European would think possible in so ordinary a material as wood. Large,
beautiful halls, with broad, open staircases and broad balusters, greet
the visitor; large fireplaces, with handsomely carved chimney-pieces,
high wainscotings on the walls and beautiful beams across the ceilings.
The more modest houses show the same thing on a smaller scale. There was
this one style through the whole town, and its rules were regarded as
canonical. In certain parts of the country there were inconspicuous
traces of Spanish, French, and Dutch influence, which survive to-day in
many places, especially in the South, and contribute to the
picturesqueness of the architectural whole.
After the Revolutionary period, people wished to break with English
traditions, and the immigration from many different countries brought a
great variety of architectural stimulation. A time of general imitation
had arrived, for in architecture also the country was to grow from the
provincial to the national through a cosmopolitan stage. At the end of
the eighteenth century, architecture was chiefly influenced by the
classic Greek. Farmhouses masqueraded as big temples, and the
thoughtless application of this form became so monotonous that it was
not continued very long in private houses. Then the Capitol at
Washington was begun by Latrobe and finished by the more competent
Bulfinch, and it became the model for almost all state capitols of the
Union. Bulfinch himself designed the famous State House of
Massachusetts, but it was the Puritan spirit of Boston which selected
the austere Greek temple to typify the public spirit. The entire
century, in spite of many variations, stood under this influence, and
until recently nobody has ventured to put up a civil structure in a
freer, more picturesque style.
Many of these single state capitols built during the century, such as
the old one at Albany, are admirable; while the post-offices,
custom-houses, and other buildings dedicated to federal uses have been
put up until recently cheaply and without thought. Lately, however, the
architect has been given freer play. Meanwhile taste had wandered from
the classic era to the Middle Ages, and the English Gothic had come to
be popular. The romantic took the place of the classic, and the
buildings were made picturesque. The effect of this was most happy on
church edifices, and about the middle of the century Richard Upjohn,
“the father of American architecture,” built a number of famous churches
in the Gothic style.
But in secular edifices this spirit went wholly to architectural
lawlessness. People were too little trained to preserve a discipline of
style along with the freedom of the picturesque. And even more
unfortunate than the lack of training of the architect, who committed
improprieties because uncertain in his judgment, there was the
tastelessness of the parvenu patron, and this particularly in the West.
Then came the time of unrest and vulgar splurge, when in a single
residential street palaces from all parts of the world were cheaply
copied, and just as in Europe forgotten styles were superficially
reproduced. The Queen Anne style became fashionable; and then native
colonial and Dutch motives were revived.
This period is now long past. The last twenty-five years in the East and
the last ten years in the West have seen this tasteless, hap-hazard, and
ignorant experimenting with different styles give place to building
which is thoughtful, independent, and generally beautiful; though, of
course, much that is ugly has continued to be built. Architecture itself
has developed a careful school, and the public has been trained by the
architects. Of course, many regrettable buildings survive from former
periods, so that the general impression to-day is often very confused;
but the newer streets in the residential, as well as the business,
portions of cities and towns display the fitting homes and office
buildings of a wealthy, independent, and art-loving people. In
comparison with Europe, a negative feature may be remarked; namely, the
notable absence of rococo tendencies. It is sometimes found in interior
decorations, but never on exteriors.
The positive features which especially strike the European are the
prevalence of Romanesque and of the sky-scrapers. The round arch of the
Romans comes more immediately from southern France; but since its
introduction to America, notably by the architectural genius Richardson,
the round arch has become far more popular than in Europe, and has given
rise to a characteristic American style, which is represented to-day in
hundreds of substantial buildings all over the country. There is
something heavy, rigid, and at the same time energetic, in these great
arches resting on short massive columns, in the great, pointed, round
towers, in the heavy balconies and the low arcades. The primitive force
of America has found its artistic expression here, and the ease with
which the new style has adapted itself to castle-like residences, banks,
museums, and business houses, and the quickness with which it has been
adopted, in the old streets of Boston as in the newer ones of Chicago
and Minneapolis, all show clearly that it is a really living style, and
not merely an architectural whim.
The Romanesque style grew from an artistic idea, while the sky-scraper
has developed through economic exigencies. New York is an island,
wherefore the stage of her great business life cannot be extended, and
every inch has had to be most advantageously employed. It was necessary
to build higher than commercial structures have ever been carried in
Europe. At first these buildings were twenty stories high, but now they
are even thirty. To rest such colossal structures on stone walls would
have necessitated making the walls of the lower stories so thick as to
take up all the most desirable room, and stone was therefore replaced by
steel. The entire structure is simply a steel framework, lightly cased
in stone. Herewith arose quite new architectural problems. The
subdivision of the twenty-story façade was a much simpler problem than
the disposal of the interior space, where perhaps twenty elevators have
to be speeding up and down, and ten thousand men going in and out each
day. The problem has been admirably solved. The absolute adaptation of
the building to its requirements, and its execution in the most
appropriate material—namely, steel and marble—the shaping of the rooms
to the required ends, and the carrying out of every detail in a
thoroughly artistic spirit make a visit to the best office buildings of
New York an æsthetic delight. And since very many of these are now built
side of one another, they give the sky-line of the city a strength and
significance which strike every one who is mature enough to find beauty
in that to which he is not accustomed. When the problem had once been
solved, it was natural for other industrial cities to imitate New York,
and the sky-scraper is now planted all over the West.
American architecture of to-day is happily situated, because the
population is rapidly growing, is extraordinarily wealthy, and seriously
fond of art. An architect who has to be economical, must make beauty
secondary to utility. In the western part of the country, considerable
economy is often exercised and mostly in the very worst way. The
pretentious appearance of the building is preserved, but the
construction is made cheap; the exterior is made of stucco instead of
stone, and the interior finish is not carved, but pressed. This may not,
after all, be so much for the sake of economy, as by reason of a
deficient æsthetic sense. People who would not think of preferring a
chromo-lithograph to an oil-painting do not as yet feel a similar
distinction between architectural materials. For the most part, however,
the buildings now erected are rich and substantial. The large public and
semi-public buildings, court-houses and universities, state capitols and
city halls, libraries and museums are generally brilliant examples of
architecture. The same is true of the buildings for industrial
corporation, offices, banks, hotels, life-insurance companies,
stock-exchanges, counting-houses, railway stations, theatres and clubs,
all of which, by their restrained beauty, inspire confidence and attract
the eye. These are companies with such large capital that they never
think of exercising economy on their buildings. The architect can do
quite as he likes. New York has a dozen large hotels, each one of which
is, perhaps, more splendid in marble and other stones than any hotel in
Europe; and while Chicago, Boston, and other cities have fewer such
hotels, they have equally handsome ones.
The fabulously rapid and still relatively late growth of handsome public
buildings in the last decade is interesting from still another point of
view. It reveals a trait in the American public mind which we have
repeatedly contrasted with the thought of Europe. American ambitions
have grown out of the desire for self-perfection. The American’s own
person must be scrupulously, neatly, and carefully dressed, his own
house must be beautiful; and only when the whole nation, as it were, has
satisfied the needs of the individual can æsthetic feeling go out to the
community as a whole—from the individual persons to the city, from the
private house to the public building. It has been exactly the opposite
on the European Continent. The ideal individual was later than the ideal
community. Splendid public buildings were first put up in Europe, while
people resided in ugly and uninviting houses.
There was a period in which the American did not mind stepping from his
daily bath, and going from his sumptuous home immaculately attired to a
railway station or court-house which was screamingly hideous and reeking
with dirt. And similarly there was a time in which the Germans and the
French moved in and out of the wonderful architectural monuments of
their past in dirty clothing, and perhaps without having bathed for many
days. In Germany the public building has influenced the individual, and
eventually worked toward beautifying his house. In America the
individual and the private house have only very slowly spread their
æsthetic ideals through the public buildings. The final results in both
countries must be the same. There is exactly the same contrast in the
ethical field; whereas in Germany and France public morals have spread
into private life, in America individual morals have spread into public
life. As soon as the transition has commenced it proceeds rapidly.
In Germany few private houses are now built without a bathroom, and in
America few public buildings without consideration for what is
beautiful. The great change in railway stations indicates the rapidity
of the movement. Even ten years ago there were huge car-sheds in the
cities, and little huts in country districts, which so completely lacked
any pretensions to beauty that æsthetic criticism was simply out of
place. Now, on the contrary, most of the large cities have palatial
stations, of which some are among the most beautiful in the world, and
many railway companies have built attractive little stations all along
their lines. As soon as such a state of things has come about, a
reciprocal influence takes place between the individual and the communal
desire for perfection, and the æsthetic level of the nation rises daily.
So, too, the different arts stimulate one another. The architect plans
his work from year to year more with the painter and sculptor in mind,
so that the erection of new buildings and the growth and wealth of the
people benefit not merely architecture, but the other arts as well.
Still other factors are doing their part to elevate the artistic life of
the United States. And here particularly works the improved organization
of the artistic professions. In former times, the true artist had to
prefer Europe to his native home, because in his home he found no
congenial spirits; this is now wholly changed. There is still the
complaint that the American cities are even now no Kunststädte; and,
compared with Munich or with Paris, this is still true. But New York is
no more and no less a Kunststädte than is Berlin. In all the large
cities of America the connoisseurs and patrons of art have organized
themselves in clubs, and the national organizations of architects,
painters, and sculptors, have become influential factors in public life;
and the large art schools with well-known teachers and the studios of
private masters have become great centres for artistic endeavour. A
general historical study of architecture has even been introduced in
universities, and already the erection of a national academy of art is
so actively discussed that it will probably be very soon realized.
Certainly every American artist will continue to visit Europe, as every
German artist visits Italy; but all the conditions are now ripe in
America for developing native talent on native soil.
The artistic education of the public is not less important nor far
behind the professional education of the artist. We have discussed the
general appreciation of architecture, and the same public education is
quietly going on in the art museums. Of course, the public art galleries
of America are necessarily far behind those of Europe, since the art
treasures of the world were for the most part distributed when America
began to collect. And yet it is surprising what treasures have been
secured, and in some branches of modern painting and industrial art the
American collections are not to be surpassed. Thus the Japanese
collection of pottery in Boston has nowhere its equal, and the
Metropolitan Museum in New York leads the world in several respects.
Modern German art is unfortunately ill represented, but modern French
admirably. Here is a large field open for a proper German ambition;
German art needs to be recognized much more throughout the country. It
must show that American distrust is absolutely unjustified, that it has
made greater artistic advances than any other nation, and that German
pictures are quite worthy of a large place in the collections.