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It is often argued that there has never been a truly
American art, that all our painters received their techniques from other lands. The men we have discussed,
for instance, are supposed to have been provincial offshoots of the British school. True, no major painters
on the North American continent have been influenced solely by their own nationals, but we may search the
history of modern art in vain to find any major painters anywhere who never looked beyond their national
boundaries. Actually those early canvases of America's old masters in which each outstripped his inferior
teach-ers, most of Copley's work, and much of the work of Peale come as close to the phenomenon of local
inspiration as any important paintings of modern times. A completely self-sufficient art can exist only in
complete isolation. Able minds seeking perfection will welcome assistance from whatever quarter it may come*
and only a fool will refuse to consider an idea because it originated in the next county or the next nation.
Thus the conception of a purely national art is as much a fallacy as the conception of a pure race; art and
blood have mingled since the first ship was launched and the first road built.
Let us consider the English school into which some American
critics like to toss America's old masters; according to the same nationalistic standards, would it be
English at all? Reynolds, its leader, was an eclectic who argued that great painting could be achieved only
by combining the virtues of the great painters of the past; "there is only one door to the school of
nature," he said, "and of that the old masters hold the key." He was conspicuously influenced by many
Italians: Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, the Caracas, Correggio, Guido Reni, and others. Three Dutch and
Flemish painters—Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck—taught him much of his skill. And he followed the theories
of the German Winckel
mann by imitating the statues of the Greeks and Romans.
Into
what nationalistic pigeonhole shall we
place Reynolds?.
Suzanne La Follette stated an important truth when she
said that no great art is nationalistic, but that all great art is national. Esthetic influences come from
everywhere to make a painter, but any authentic painter automatically stamps his own personality on his work.
Whether he wills it or not, this personality is formed by his time and place: by what his parents told him when
he was a child, by the economic order in which he struggled, by the attitude of his contemporaries toward his
ambitions and his canvases. Only if he is so weak a man that he slavishly copies other painters can his work
fail to reveal the civilization in which he lived.
By studying America's old masters against the
background of their nation and their times, we have discovered that they reacted very differently to the
influences that formed their British contemporaries, and that this divergence was largely due to the cruder
and more forthright society from which they came. Even Benjamin West, the expatriate who gives our nationalists
their best argument against our painters, never lived down his twenty-two formative years in the Colonies; when
he was an old man, his English friends insisted that he was still an American at heart, and, as we have seen,
his best canvases resulted when he turned back to the realism of his American origin.
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