English Accents

Interactions with British Art c. 1776-1855

Christiana Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351159029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In the century following the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, British art had an international reputation: prints spread knowledge of the work of British artists around the globe, and it was widely seen as the product of a modern, commercial society, and much admired by artists as diverse as Goya in Spain, Delacroix in France, and Bierstadt in America. In recent years, scholars working on this period have become increasingly aware of the international context of their subject, but there has been no systematic analysis of the reception of British art abroad. This collection of essays looks at the uses made of the paintings of Reynolds, Hogarth, Lawrence and their contemporaries on the continent of Europe, and in the colonies and ex-colonies of Australia and America. The authors go beyond the simple issue of 'influence' to consider how ideas and artistic conventions originating in the British Isles were adapted, appropriated or resisted in these new environments. In the process, some surprising views of British art emerge, demonstrating how a multi-faceted view from the outside can correct and enrich the narrative produced within a national school, and revealing some of the important connections that are obscured when art is studied, as it so often is, within narrow national boundaries.

1
Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited

David Bindman

There is a history still to be written on American attitudes towards British art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will be a rich and complex one for it was not always clear even in the fifty or so years after the War of Independence that Britain or the United States were foreign countries to each other, as painters continued to emigrate from Britain to America, and American painters to study and settle in London. The War of Independence was essentially a civil war fought by members of the same nation, hence it left behind deep and contradictory feelings of broken identity, made all the more complex by the strong support for the American Revolution in Britain, and the strength of loyalist feeling in America. In this essay I want to focus on the art of the period of the actual break between Britain and America.

The art of the American colonies before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 was the product of a transatlantic circuit in which artists came over from Britain either as visitors or settlers, and young painters in America looked to London for their training. A number sought, like the young John Singleton Copley, to exhibit at the Royal Academy and make a career in the capital, following the success of the King's painter, the Pennsylvanian Benjamin West. One might expect this traffic to come to an abrupt end with the War of Independence, but in reality young American artists still made their way to what had become the enemy capital, even though France had been an enthusiastic ally. One might also add that Paris was in every sense more hospitable to Americans and arguably had better artists and more established teaching institutions than London. This essay will explore the reasons for the continuing attraction of London for American artists, and the complexities of their position, by focusing on the London work of John Trumbull.

Contemporary history painting

The main attraction that drew ambitious young American artists to London from the 1760s onwards was the studio of Benjamin West, who was, despite his elevated position in England, of American birth himself, and he retained good contacts in his native country, encouraging young painters to enter his studio. West was renowned above all for applying the principles of history painting to modern and contemporary events, using contemporary dress. West, as Edgar Wind pointed out in 1938,¹ was the inventor of the genre of contemporary history painting, and Philippe Bordes has discussed the impact of his work on Jacques-Louis David, especially on Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (Versailles).² West's primacy in this field was recognized by George Washington, himself the subject of many contemporary history paintings. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson of 1 August 1786 he expressed a preference for being sculpted by Houdon in contemporary rather than antique dress:

I should even scarcely have ventured to suggest, that perhaps a servile adherence to the garb of antiquity might not be altogether expedient, as some little deviation in favour of the modem costume, if I had not learnt from Colonel Humphreys, that this was a circumstance hinted in conversation by Mr. West to Houdon. This taste, which has been introduced in painting by West, I understand is received with applause, and prevails extensively.³

The idea that the hero himself might have a view on his own representation was just one of the problems attendant on applying the principles of history painting to contemporary events. The traditional premise of history painting from its origins in the Italian Renaissance, was that it represented the story of an exemplary and heroic deed acted out in the distant or mythical past; as Racine put it, 'One may say that the respect that one has for the hero grows in proportion as he recedes from us.'⁴ Furthermore, modern subjects brought into history painting questions of accuracy of representation especially of the participants, who might (unlike the hero himself, whose heroism was likely to end in death) still be alive when the painting was completed.

Edgar Wind argued forcefully that contemporary history painting, and the breach that it implied with academic rules of history painting, 'was produced by the impact of democratic ideas proclaimed by a group of American artists', like West himself, John Singleton Copley, and the former's pupils. West's originating role is beyond doubt, and the moment of initiation can be dated to The Death of General Wolfe of 1771, which depicted a recent act of heroism that prompted comparison with the death of the classical hero Epaminondas and of the medieval hero Bayard, the subjects of its original companion pictures.⁵ It is worth noting, however, that French artists, even towards the end of the century, evidently thought of contemporary history painting as an 'English' method and not an American one.⁶

Although the setting of the Wolfe painting was Canada and more specifically the Heights of Abraham outside Quebec City, there was nothing 'American' about the painting; it makes the implicit claim that British heroes of today were in no way inferior to the legendary heroes of the past, a commonplace in contemporary drama, as Wind pointed out.⁷ However the many American painters in his studio, several of whom practised contemporary history painting, suggested an association between the genre and American origins. This association was further reinforced by such spectacular essays in the genre as Copley's The Death of Major Peirson of 1782-84, to the extent that even in the state of war between Britain and America in the years 1776-83 and the years after, West and Copley remained a magnet for aspiring American painters, deprived in the turmoil and relative isolation of the new Republic of proper training, experience of good paintings and public support.

John Trumbull in London

John Trumbull (1756-1843)⁸ was the most prominent of these young painters, and he sought from the beginning of his career to make contemporary history paintings based on the recent events of the War of Independence. The traditional tendency of the discipline of the history of art to define itself by national schools has led to Trumbull's career being treated exclusively as part of the history of American art, a tendency reinforced in his case by his famous patriotic paintings, some of which, because of their prominent position in Washington's Capitol building, have become icons of American history. Yet in reality his decisive training took place in West's London studio, and his series of paintings of the War of Independence was conceived, begun and partially completed in London between 1784 and 1789. Wind claimed that being American in London during the war 'was socially advantageous if not positively glamorous', because of the general British support for the American cause.⁹ This is certainly an oversimplification, but even if it were broadly true a series of patriotic paintings, celebrating the victors in a war that had just resulted in the humiliating defeat of the country in which they were painted, could not be entirely unproblematic. Trumbull may well have been a glamorous figure in certain circles but on his first visit to London in 1780-81 he was jailed for eight months as an American spy and forced to leave the country immediately afterwards.¹⁰

Trumbull had been taken up by West on his first visit, but his most productive period in the latter's studio was on his return to London, where he remained from January 1784 until his return to America in November 1789, with a brief but important interlude in Paris and elsewhere on the Continent. West and Copley, whatever their private beliefs, were understood to be loyalists, although George III was at times suspicious of West's contacts with his former homeland; certainly in the later 1790s West openly expressed a desire to return to America.¹¹ West had long been resident in London while Copley had come to England to pursue a career as a painter that had been threatened by the outbreak of the War of Independence.¹² Trumbull, by contrast, was an American patriot from the beginning, whose declared intention was to return to the United States when he had learned enough to be able to paint its history. If West and Copley were sympathetic to the new American republic, they were prepared to keep quiet rather than risk the success of their paintings with the London public, a success they would have had no hope of enjoying on the other side of the Atlantic.

Trumbull was furthermore a member of the new republic's political and social elite. His father was Governor of Connecticut and the only state governor to declare for American independence.¹³ The younger Trumbull went to Harvard, and was to be on close terms with many of the leaders of the new American republic, especially Thomas Jefferson. He was involved himself, as a colonel in Washington's army, in the War of Independence; he observed the actual events depicted in his painting of the Battle of Bunker's Hill,¹⁴ though he was to resign in a huff over the length of his commission. He had, like Peter Paul Rubens, another career entirely outside painting, as a diplomat and probably a spy, but in the end he decided to devote himself to painting, turning down an invitation to become Jefferson's secretary in Paris.

Trumbull's 'Americanness' was, therefore, of a different order from that of West and Copley. On his 1780 visit to London he was an active member of a rebellious colony who, to be admitted into the country, had to make a formal declaration that he would not further the former's cause. On his second visit in 1784 he was now a citizen of a foreign power that had just won its independence. Trumbull's own account of the genesis of his War of Independence paintings in his autobiography, published in 1841 at the end of his long life,¹⁵ reduces their genesis to a single-minded desire on his part to commemorate the heroism of his new nation in the late war. Even in the middle of working on them, in March 1785, he claimed to have come to Europe only to further that object:

the great object of my wishes ... is to take up the History of Our Country, and paint the principal Events particularly of the late War: - but this is a work which to execute with any degree of honour or profit, will require very great powers - & those powers must be attain'd before I leave Europe.¹⁶

Benjamin West and the War of Independence

As one might expect, the circumstances were considerably more complicated than hindsight and autobiographical egotism would allow. In the first place it appears that the idea for a series of paintings on the War of Independence was not Trumbull's but West's. In a letter of 15 June 1783 to Charles Willson Peale in America, West announced that he was working on 'a few pictures of the great events of the American contest ... This work I mean to stile the American Revolution', with the intention of producing a series of engravings after them.¹⁷ West's purpose in writing to Peale was to procure pictures of American army uniforms to ensure accuracy, and in a further letter of 4 August 1783 he proposed to employ European engravers: 'as the subject has engaged all the powers of Europe all will be interested in seeing the event so portraid'¹⁸; it may have been for that reason that Trumbull took the first two paintings of his series to Germany to be engraved, rather than have them done in London.

The only surviving painting that has been firmly tied to West's project is The Signing of the Preliminary Treaty of Peace in 1782 (Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, Delaware).¹⁹ It was intended to show the com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: international cross-currents in an age of nationalism
• 1 Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited
• 2 Papierkultur: the British print, history and modernity in Enlightenment Germany
• 3 'Everything English is the mode here': Russian reactions to British painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
• 4 A view of New Holland: aspects of the colonial prospect
• 5 'A new people and a limited society': British art and the Spanish spectator
• 6 A la recherche de l'école anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie and Martin, three British artists in Restoration France
• 7 'Consciously objective and moral': Hogarth and the political artist in Vormärz Germany
• 8 American landscape painting and the European paradigm
• 9 Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid-nineteenth century
• 10 Unmistakably American? National myths and the historiography of landscape painting in the USA
• Afterword: British art and its histories
• Select bibliography
• Index