The American School

An unusual number of books on eighteenth-century American painting were published in 2016. Among them, Susan Rather's The American School stands out for its high production values—perfectly calibrated color illustrations and marvelously detailed color bleeds embellish almost every page. The text picks up facets of the careers of John Singleton Copley, William Williams, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, and Matthew Pratt, whose 1765 painting of a studio interior gives the book its title. But neither the explication of individual artworks, nor of eighteenth-century art pedagogy, nor the analysis of artistic status is the focus of Rather's attention (although each figures in her narrative); this is, as the subtitle directs, an inquiry into the social status of the artist in the colonial and early national periods. The question of the social position of the (gifted) artist has preoccupied Rather for some years, and much of this book is familiar. She is particularly interested in how artists self-consciously remarked on and enacted their status on a scale of value with artisan-tradesman at the “lower” end and artist-genius at the “higher” end. Drawing on letters, newspaper advertisements, and early biographies, she evaluates the level to which American artists absorbed the lessons of English and European theorists. They privileged history painting (an intellectual exercise freighted with moral and civic values) over mechanical copy work, the valence of portraiture, and they privileged the mastery of Renaissance perspective systems over the shallow depth of field that portraitists and sign painters utilized. Rather traces (and approves) the “ascent” of Copley and West as they learn and adopt London values and techniques. She has little to say about how artists were perceived by their patrons, seeing this segment of society holistically and as a class of essentially unworthy and ignorant “self-satisfied portrait subjects” (p. 27). This lack of investigation into whether artists were accepted by the class into which they sought entry is stark in a text that centrally concerns “the changing status of American artists ... from artisans to gentlemen” (p. 2

Art · Art history · Colonialism · Explication · Genius · Literature · Painting · Value (mathematics · Art Education and Development · History · Philosophy