The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 18001865
By (author) Erika Schneider
Not available to order
Publication date:
23 April 2015Length of book:
210 pagesPublisher
University of Delaware PressISBN-13: 9781611494136
This book analyzes how American painters, sculptors, and writers, active between 1800 and 1865, depicted their response to a democratic society that failed to adequately support them financially and intellectually. Without the traditional European forms of patronage from the church or the crown, American artists faced unsympathetic countrymen who were unaccustomed to playing the role of patron and less than generous in rewarding creativity. It was in this unrewarding landscape that American artists in the first half of the nineteenth century employed the “struggling” or “starving artist” image to criticize the country’s lack of patronage and immortalize their own struggles.
Although the concept of the struggling artist is well known, only a select few artists chose to represent themselves in this negative manner. Using works from five decades, Schneider demonstrates how the artists, such as Washington Allston, Charles Bird King, David Gilmour Blythe, represented a larger phenomenon of artistic struggle in America. The artists’ journals, letters, and biographies reveal how native artists’ desire to create imaginative works came in conflict with American patrons’ more practical interests in portraiture and later in the century, genre work. If artists wanted to avoid financial struggle, they had to learn to capitulate to patrons’ demands. This intellectual struggle would prove the most difficult. In addition to the fine arts, the struggling artist type in essays, poems, short stories, and novels, whose tales mirror the frustrations facing fine artists, are also considered.
Through an examination of the development of art academies and exhibition venues, this study traces the evolution of a young nation that went from considering artists as mere craftsmen to recognizing them as important members of a civilized society.
Although the concept of the struggling artist is well known, only a select few artists chose to represent themselves in this negative manner. Using works from five decades, Schneider demonstrates how the artists, such as Washington Allston, Charles Bird King, David Gilmour Blythe, represented a larger phenomenon of artistic struggle in America. The artists’ journals, letters, and biographies reveal how native artists’ desire to create imaginative works came in conflict with American patrons’ more practical interests in portraiture and later in the century, genre work. If artists wanted to avoid financial struggle, they had to learn to capitulate to patrons’ demands. This intellectual struggle would prove the most difficult. In addition to the fine arts, the struggling artist type in essays, poems, short stories, and novels, whose tales mirror the frustrations facing fine artists, are also considered.
Through an examination of the development of art academies and exhibition venues, this study traces the evolution of a young nation that went from considering artists as mere craftsmen to recognizing them as important members of a civilized society.
Schneider’s important study fills a gap in American art history scholarship by focusing on a period, the early to mid-nineteenth century, and works of art under addressed in published literature on images of artists. Its greatest strength is the balance of visual and literary perceptions of artists, which enables a richer assessment of artist imagery of this time than has been attempted before. Well-known artist images by Washington Allston, Charles Bird King, and David Gilmour Blythe, along with lesser-known images by John Krimmel and Horatio Greenough, are interrogated in great detail and solidly contextualized within their social, cultural, and political milieus. Those interested in the development of an American artistic identity at a time when many contested the value and role of the arts in the young democracy will find much of relevance here.