Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:      

“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”      

Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.      

 These prints effectively transmitted English style and aristocratic imagery to the colonists. According to Wayne Craven in, Colonial American Portraiture, ‘Mezzotints were the school for both patron and artist; from them, otherwise untrained would-be portrait painters could learn to draw the figure, drapery, and landscapes as well as about perspective, light, and shade, the representation of textures, and the proper image in which to cast their subjects.’ For most Colonial artists, these portraits not only served as a form of art education, but they were the models upon which colonial artists consequently based their own portrait paintings.      

Several colonial artists were not content to remain in America, traveling abroad to gain exposure to European art and to pursue an art education. Benjamin West began his career as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. In 1760 he left to make the Grand Tour of Europe, permanently settling in London three years later. There, West met with remarkable success: in 1772 he was named Historical Painter to King George III and in 1792 he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy. Understandably, West’s story became mythic in the Colonies and his London studio became a mecca of sorts for Colonial American artists.      

The long, narrow format of West’s, Chryseis, oil sketch is informed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy in London, who created historically-themed paintings in the Grand Manner. Reynolds’s lectures to the Royal Academy, published in his Discourses, were extremely influential on this generation of American artists and, through his writings, Americans learned the Neo-Classical method, which involved developing a painting from numerous sketches and studies.      

Colonial American artists ascertained from imported treatises on art—Reynolds’ Discourses among them—that the most important and ambitious form of painting was history painting. These were narrative scenes from history, literature, mythology, and the Bible offering a moral, didactic component. History painting topped the hierarchy of genres, while portraiture fell somewhere near the bottom. Additionally, history painting required an artist to be able to paint a range of figures, landscape, drapery, architecture, and still life. The problem was that history painting did not find an audience in the Colonies: Americans wanted portraits. Perhaps Americans were not as familiar with Greek mythology and Classical literature as their European counterparts and were unable to appreciate this genre. Nevertheless, John Singleton Copley grew frustrated with the lack of appreciation for history painting and he wrote to West, circa 1767:      

“A taste of painting is too much Wanting to afford any kind of helps; and was it not for preserving the resemble[n]ce of particular persons, painting would not be known in the plac[e]. The people generally regard it no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shoemaker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World. Which is not a little Mortifying to me.”     

Like West, Copley tired of painting only portraits and yearned to paint history. In 1774 he set sail for Europe in order to pursue his career as a history painter.      

 Copley arrived in London in July, of that year and before departing on his Grand Tour of Europe, met Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Copley would settle permanently in England and work as an artist producing portraits and history paintings. In 1778 he painted, Watson and the Shark, hailed as one of the first Romantic paintings (with its emphasis on human instincts, emotions and instincts). Copley’s success as an artist won him the commission in 1783 from the Court of the Common Council to execute an enormous canvas depicting the Siege of Gibraltar. This history painting was to depict a critical battle in the seige by the Spanish and French armies of British-held Gibraltar. In traditional Grand Manner, Copley developed his painting from numerous compositional sketches and individual figure studies from models and props in his studio. On the final figure studies, Copley drew a grid to aid in transferring image to canvas.      

The Nineteenth Century

After the second decade of the nineteenth century, American artists turned increasingly to landscape as their preferred subject matter. They saw nature as linked to religion and the landscape as a visible manifestation of God. However, the pristine American wilderness lacked human associations. In Europe, particularly in Italy, they found in the landscape a repository of history and culture.      

American artists traveled in greater numbers than ever before to make the European Grand Tour, beginning in England, continuing through France, Switzerland, Italy and often, Germany and the Low Countries. By mid-century, however, a concentration of American artists settled in Italy, some for a few months, others permanently. For these “travelers in Arcadia,” Italy was much more than a vacation spot.      

Americans found Italy compelling because of its age. America offered primeval forests and ancient rocks, but its history was, after all, a natural history. American audiences desired the cultivated, civilized antiquity that Europe could offer. In Italy, the storied past was everywhere. American artist Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) was constantly aware of history during his stay in Rome, exclaiming, “I walk out and wherever I go I tread upon earth consecrated by the footsteps of the great of other days”[1].  The Italian landscape itself was history.  But, as Barbara Novak observed in, Nature and Culture (1980), ‘Italy was, in fact, so replete with the wisdom of the ages that it was removed from time.’      

History painting remained as enticing an art form for Thomas Cole (1801-48) as it had been for the generation of expatriate American artists before him. Responding to the ongoing American appetite for historical motifs, Cole created a painterly compromise by transferring the aims of history painting to the landscape genre. He retained the same large canvas size which had up until now been reserved for history painting; he developed his landscape paintings from numerous sketches and studies according to the tenets of the Royal Academy for Grand Manner painting; and he retained the narrative by substituting human figures with elements of the landscape. For Cole, the narrative always took precedence over formal elements in his work; linking Cole with Grand Manner history painting and predecessor, Sir Joshua Reynolds, writing in, Discourses, “Like the history painter, a painter of landscapes in this style and with this conduct, sends the imagination back into antiquity.”      

If Italy was history, it was also art. In Rome, according to one American, “there were open air pictures waiting to be painted everywhere around us”[2]. The coincidence of actual views with landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa—artists whom the Americans had greatly admired—joined art and nature in a way that was unknown in America.      

 Cole was one of the first Hudson River School artists to travel to Europe. He set sail in June of 1829 and on his arrival in London, he studied drawings by Claude Lorrain in the British Museum. In 1831 Cole left London for Italy and the next year, he rented the “Tempietto”, Lorrain’s studio in Rome. Placing himself in that studio certainly reinforced his tendency to see the Italian landscape through Lorrain’s eyes. The Claudian construct, consisting of framing trees, a central body of water, and distant mountains bathed in a golden light, proved to be a convenient compositional formula for the depiction of the beautiful landscape. The Claudian construct played a role in the Italian landscapes painted by Cole, as well as by the other Hudson River School artists. The Italian experience was key in Thomas Cole’s work: six years after he left Italy he continued to draw on his Italian experience in painting.      

Cole’s second and last trip to Europe was in 1841. In 1842, he traveled to Sicily, where he responded to the ancient ruins of the theater at Taormina, juxtaposed against volcanic Mount Aetna, smoldering in the distance. The timeless qualities of nature underlined for Cole the temporality of the productions of man. This narrative serves to elevate Cole’s landscape and exemplifies his compromise blend of landscape and history.      

William Louis Sonntag, a self-trained Cincinnati artist, made his first trip to Italy in 1853 where, like Cole, he was captured by that country’s spell, later returned to spend a year in Florence (1855-56). His, Ruins, reveals his fascination with these remnants of ancient culture. However, he does not depict recognizable ruins or an identifiable locale. Perhaps he was unable to separate the antique from the contemporary, a problem noted by George Hillard in his guidebook Six Months in Italy (1854):      

“Many of the ruins in Rome are not happily placed for effect upon the eye and mind. They do not stand apart in solitary grandeur, forming a shrine for memory and thought, and envolving an atmosphere of their own. They are often in unfavorable positions and bear the shadow in disenchanting proximities … The trail of the present is every where over the past.”      

Ruins become the symbols of the perishability of art as nature takes its course. Sonntag may have chosen to depict these ruins out of his sense of Romanticism, allowing the melancholy ruins in the landscape to serve as a vehicle for conveying his emotions. Melancholy, loneliness, and silence as sensations evocative of Italy appealed very much to Americans who, like Nathaniel Hawthorne welcomed European “shadow” to contrast with its utter absence in America.      

In Italy—a country synonymous with art—painters like Cole and Sonntag could commit themselves completely to their craft. Italy offered a supportive and aesthetically-rich environment for American artists, whereas in America, artistic endeavor was still viewed with some degree of suspicion. Some American artists found the conditions in America debilitating. The American community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who settled in Italy at mid-century was quite large and the support system among them significant.      

American artists traveled abroad not only to live the life of an artist within a supportive community, but also to learn the artist’s craft. In the 1840s the National Academy of Design in New York offered students the most traditional form of art education in America. The Academy’s Antique School, for example, enabled students to copy casts after antique sculpture. However there were few art schools in America where students could draw from live models and few public art collections where artists could view paintings and sculpture. As a result, Americans at mid century flocked to Italy. But unlike eighteenth century artists, those of the nineteenth-century artists did not go specifically to study with a master or enroll in an Italian art academy.      

The educational experience pursued by Americans abroad was constructed in part from viewing and copying works by the Old Masters and, in an effort to educate their eye, these artists studied the vast public art collections.      

 In Rome, some attended the costume schools, or Public Schools as they were sometimes called, where they drew and painted from costumed models in the evenings. Costumes appealed to the American sensibility and descriptions of costumes frequently found their way into guidebooks to Italy. At the costume school, models dressed in colorful Italian regional clothing and posed for the artists. John Frederick Kensett attended such a school as did Christopher Cranch, Thomas Hicks and, very likely, Albert Bierstadt, as well.      

Bierstadt arrived in Rome in 1856 after studying in Germany. In oil on paper Bierstadt recorded three poses of a model dressed in an elaborate costume topped by a red cloak. These studies were intended for later use in the studio where they served as an artist’s repertory of costumes and poses which could be inserted into studio compositions. While human figures seemingly play a small role in Bierstadt’s oeuvre, even a single figure could, as John Falconer suggested to Cropsey, either mar or set the tone for an entire landscape.[3]      

Nature, of course, remained the primary inspiration for the landscape painters.      

Hudson River School artists continued their practice of sketching expeditions during the summer months when they were abroad. In the summer of 1848, Jasper Cropsey and fellow-artists, Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) made an extended sketching tour into Southern Italy. They arrived in Sorrento in May and, the following month, Cropsey executed this pencil sketch, Sorrento (1848). He carefully depicted the crumbling arcaded bridge in pencil, and indicated highlights in white wash. The majority of Hudson River School painters executed careful pencil studies of this type during the summer months. These served as information and inspiration throughout the winter. Cropsey carried his pencil sketches from southern Italy back to his New York studio, where they provided specific details in his large landscape compositions. As such, Cropsey’s drawing exemplified the activities of many of the American landscape painters in Italy during the mid nineteenth century, whether they were working in Italy, France, Spain, or England.      

Sketching trips revolved around specific locations where artists gathered informally, often depicting the same views. The result was an outdoor classroom of sorts–an informal sharing of ideas and techniques–and a source of competition and encouragement. European artists had long-considered a sketching tour of Italy as part of their studies. And their American counterparts followed in their footsteps. Americans relied on English language guidebooks (Murray’s handbooks to Italy, George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy (1854), and Piale’s, Guide to Naples and Sicily (1847) for itineraries that would lead them through the most picturesque parts of the Italian countryside. These indispensable guides were read at home in preparation for a trip, and then carried with the artist-tourists throughout Italy. Guidebooks not only suggested the most picturesque scenery, but detailed the must-see monuments on the Grand Tour. These views and the guidebook descriptions, taken together, function within the vedute tradition.      

“A ‘veduta’,” Peter Galassi explains, “is an exact visual counterpart to the guidebook,” and “parallel to the itinerary is the repertory of the vedute, a standard series of views each representing a famous place.” At every important Italian site, artists “gradually established the best vantage point from which the important monuments could be seen most clearly.” Guidebooks, such as George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy and Murray’s, Handbook of Rome, clearly made contributions to the standardization of certain views. Galassi continues: ‘Through repetition, the favored viewpoint- and the corresponding pictorial design-achieved an iconic status. …The major views of the repertory crowded out alternatives so that each place and its history became identified with a single image….'[4]. Very often, guidebooks pointed out the most advantageous spots for viewing monuments and picturesque scenery and artists would sometimes match word for image. One guidebook described “the great torch of Vesuvius hanging over the Bay of Naples” adding that “A painter could no where find a better model from which to draw an ideal mountain…. in the Bay of Naples the meeting of the sea and the land is like the embrace of long-parted lovers.”      

 While most artists took the traditional Grand Tour, some artist-cum-explorers went farther afield, searching for ever-more exotic locations. Albert Pinkham Ryder spent five months traveling through Europe, even venturing into Tangiers in North Africa. Samuel Colman, a second-generation Hudson River School artist, traveled through Spain into Northern Africa on his Grand Tour. Ronda, Spain’s sublime location, along with its resident population of banditti who preyed on tourists, added an element of danger to Colman’s tour. The sublimity of the landscape was matched only by the treacherous journey undertaken by the artists who sketched there. Barbara Novak observed that “The artist became the hero of his own journey–which replaced the heroic themes of mythology–by vanquishing physical obstacles en route to a destination,” resulting in the “displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the persona of the artist ….”      

During the first half of the nineteenth century Venice also lay outside the typical Grand Tourist itinerary. Like Tangiers and Ronda, Venice held an exotic appeal for Americans.      

There were very few Americans in Venice before 1860 and the city had the reputation of being crime-ridden and immoral. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited in 1833 he called it “a city for beavers … a most disagreeable residence”[5]. Lord Byron, whose Romantic writings (e.g. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) so influenced Americans for three decades following his death in 1824, were instrumental in transforming Venice into “a fairy city of the heart” for American Grand Tourists. Additionally, John Ruskin’s, Stones of Venice (1851) was important in altering Americans’ opinion of Venice. Excerpts of his book were reprinted in the American art periodical, The Crayon, in 1855.      

After 1860, Americans’ perception of Venice changed dramatically. Between 1860 and 1920, they arrived in Venice in unprecedented numbers, with as many as ninety American artists recorded as having worked there. Margaretta Lovell observed in, Venice, The American View (1984), that, “Venice represented an exoticism of a distinct kind, not only was it physically remote and very beautiful, it was also clearly more than any other European or American urban center, non-industrial and technologically archaic.” That archaism was also a draw for Americans who viewed the city as a time capsule preserving an important part of the past.      

End- Part I      

Part II- ‘Americans in France’ (to be posted soon)      

This article includes excerpts from the original exhibition catalogue: American Artists Abroad and Their Inspiration: Selections from the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, in New London, Connecticut, in 2004. To receive a complete 64-page catalogue, with full-color illustrations for $18, plus 3.50, shipping, please contact info@artesmagazine.com

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Bibliography:   

[1] Cranch’s journal, quoted in Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch 1813-1892, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917, p. 122.  Much of this essay has been derived from my Ph.D. dissertation: Lured by the Muses: Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), New York: Columbia University, 1997.   

[2]Cranch quoted in Scott, op. cit., p. 105.   

[3]Falconer to Cropsey, letter dated October 29, 1848, in the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.   

[4]Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy, Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 85.   

[5]Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Erica Hirschler, “Gondola Days,” in Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992 pp. 113-114.  In Emerson’s journal entry for “Venice 2 June 1833,” he commented “Under full moon, later in the evening St. Mark’s piazza showed like a world’s wonder, but I still pity the people who are not beavers, and yet are compelled to live here.” in Alfred R. Fergusen, ed., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1964, vol. 4, p. 74.