lio                          America's Old Masters

unnecessary expenses, discouraged industry," and increased "im­morality, impiety, and contempt for religion." This law was re-enacted as late as 1784.

Perhaps because of religious opposition, all Pelham's innumer­able activities did not bring in enough money to enable his new wife to give up her tobacco shop; the house to which Copley moved was continually alive with the voices of customers and the droning of pupils. However, it contained a marvellous room into which the boy could flee. Here was the scarred table on which Pelham made his prints, here were all the sharp and intricate tools of art. His step-father took delight in teaching the eager youngster how to en­grave. Pelham occasionally did oil paintings too, and he allowed the boy to dabble in bright pigments, to spread paint with soft, imported brushes. Or, first making sure Copley's hands were clean, Pelham would bring down from a shelf the prints of English paint­ings that he tried to sell the parsimonious Colonial connoisseurs; Copley fingered in excitement black and white representations of portraits by Highmore and Hudson, and wondered whether a mere American could ever do as well. Indeed, chance had thrown the lad into one of the two or three households in the Colonies where art was the predominant interest.

For American art was in an extremely primitive state; painting was, like dancing and the theatre, frowned on by the divines. The early Puritans, descendants of Cromwell's image-breakers, had taken care that no pictures should sully their ideal Commonwealth by catering to "the lust of the eyes." Their God was the vengeful God of the Old Testament who did not speak through nature, but stood back and judged nature; they saw no relation between re­ligion and beauty. All aesthetic delights were vanity.

This philosophy, which placed its emphasis on practical things, was perfectly suited to a civilization lying uneasily between a tem­pestuous sea and an even more tempestuous wilderness. Houses had to be built somehow and furnished with a few necessities, land had to be tilled quickly before people starved, guns had to be for ever primed to withstand savage invasions. A man who ate corn while he painted pictures but grew no corn would have been a dead weight. Nor, as the settlement advanced, did this situation greatly change. True, cities took the place of villages, but they brought with them new problems of organization, and always in the back country there was more land to be developed and fought for. In addition, the sys­tem of quit-rents and the British laws which limited American manufactures and gave England a monopoly of trade kept Ameri­cans continually in debt to the mother country. There was no superflux to spend on painting.

The idea still lingering in some polite American minds that an interest in art is suitable solely for women is a hangover from those early days when female handiwork was the only economically prac­tical means of decoration. During the long winters, housewives made turkey-work rugs too precious to put on the floor; they cov­ered tables and chests. In richer circles, the young ladies scowled over embroidery frames or made designs with feathers that were framed and hung on the walls. When Peter Pelham wished to teach art, he was forced to advertise a course for young ladies in "painting upon glass," and to add dancing to his curriculum. Undoubtedly he was despised for his interest in such feminine things.

There was, however, one chink in the armour that protected Americans from "limners": pompous divines and rising merchants could not endure the thought that posterity would never see their features. In the absence of photography, they had to patronize painters, as also did the immigrants who wished to send their like­nesses back to families left across the water. Thus a small demand for the services of painters grew up, not that the painters were ad­mired therefore, any more than we today admire the hairdressers we patronize. This demand was extremely unsophisticated, the kind that would be met today by a journeyman photographer. Nothing was wanted but a recognizable likeness; art as such did not enter into the reckoning at all, since most of the settlers had come from the poorer classes in England that had never concerned them­selves with pictures in the Old World and thus had no basis for taste. They preferred paintings to the cheaper black paper silhou­ettes merely because paintings were able to give a more faithful image.