As the nineteenth century progressed, manuals became more systematic. Carington Bowles’s The Artist’s Assistant, an English text reprinted in Philadelphia in 1794, advised students to begin by copying “the several features of the human face”—eyes, nose, and mouth, borrowed from Charles Le Brun’s drawings—which were included in the book before progressing to outlining profiles, full faces, and figures. By the 1830s, Rembrandt Peale’s Graphics insisted that anyone could learn to draw. “Try” was spelled out across the bottom of the book’s title page; subsequent editions added the promise that “Nothing is denied to well-directed Industry.” Assuming that his readers might never have seen an actual painter at work, Peale began by explaining how to hold a pencil and position oneself in front of an easel. He proceeded through penmanship, lines, and geometric shapes before showing readers how to identify the angles that gave shape to, say, a human nose.28
The market for such books was partly, perhaps mostly, fueled by growing numbers of amateurs, keen to acquire the kind of polite and useful art offered in academies. But the boundary separating amateur and vocational training was porous at best. Would-be professionals benefited from many of the same texts that were sold to amateurs. Archibald Robertson pitched his drawing and painting manuals, like his school, at amateurs and professionals alike. And when teenaged William Dunlap took painting lessons from William Williams as a means of mastering his craft, he was surprised when his teacher presented him with a drawing book “such as I had possessed for years.”29 One man’s preprofessional textbook was another’s leisure reading.
Manuals were useful for more than teaching a reader how to depict forms on paper or canvas. They borrowed heavily from the Anglo-American aesthetic canon to weigh in on what kinds of forms displayed the finest taste and why. Thus Robertson’s Elements of the Graphic Arts included essays on the “Theory of Painting” and the “Picturesque and the Beautiful” as well as instructions for schematizing the human profile as a series of triangles.30 Painting and drawing books surely compensated for the absence of flesh-and-blood instructors and paucity of academic training. But they also composed yet another strand in a wide-ranging discourse on taste. They grounded painters in a shared set of aesthetic principles. Manuals thus helped distill taste into technique. In so doing, they worked to align the sensibilities and expectations of artists and patrons.
The Artist’s Eye
Mastering the manual skills and the technical knowledge that painting demanded was no small matter; the obstacles were considerable. Yet, when we read early national artists’ diaries, memoirs, and letters, it is striking how little they have to say about the acquisition of technique (exercised by the hand) and how much they have to say about the acquisition of taste (manifested in a good eye). In the narratives they spun about themselves, the difficulties of learning to treat canvas or ivory, to mix colors, to paint are eclipsed by the challenges and rewards of learning to see. Never mind that all their painstakingly acquired training took aim at both their eyes and their hands. In their telling, the process of becoming a painter was dominated by vision, yoked to intellect and imagination.
This emphasis, which amounted to a rhetorical dematerialization of the practice of painting, served to locate artists’ work in the realm of the “liberal” rather than the “mechanical” arts. It recapitulated the venerable, transatlantic hierarchies that were rooted in writings by the Earl of Shaftesbury, popularized in any number of encyclopedias and treatises on art, reinforced in belles lettres, and painstakingly copied into the commonplace books of academy students. As one authority, writing for an American encyclopedia, put it, the “noble” and “ingenious” liberal arts (which included painting, poetry, and music) depend more on the “labour of the mind that on that of the hand.” The “mechanical arts” (which included the “trades and manufactures” like weaving, clock making, carpentry, and printing) depended on “the hand and body” more than the mind. Or, in the words of Connecticut miniaturist Betsey Way Champlain, “Bright Fancy guides the pencil while I draw,/Who spurns at mechanisms servile law.”31
Such easy dismissals of the merely mechanical offered a distorted representation of the lived experience of the majority of American painters, who struggled to acquire even basic technique. So, too, the hard and fast distinctions between the work of the eye and the work of the hand, for there was no denying that, on a fundamental level, painting was a manual art that owed much to the delicacy and dexterity of an artist’s hand as it moved a brush over a piece of canvas or ivory. Yet the dematerialization of the practice of painting was a useful gambit precisely because it reinforced artists’ claims to membership in the republic of taste. Small wonder, then, that it appeared so regularly in artists’ textual self-representations. The selves fashioned by painters like Greenwood, Dunlap, and Harding gained (or squandered) cultural and financial capital with their eyes rather than their hands.
Greenwood’s extant journals, for example, simultaneously mark his progress as a painter and museum keeper and figure that progress as the development of visual acuity. He succeeded at painting and museum keeping because he had learned to succeed at looking.32 Greenwood’s interest in art is apparent almost from the journal’s earliest entries, which note his acquisition of canvases stretched on “frames suitable for painting” and his early efforts at portraiture. During the years when he vacillated between a career in law and a career in art, Greenwood made cursory notes about his painting output. The entries changed in frequency and tone after 1813 when Greenwood decided to devote himself “strictly to painting.”33 He began to take greater care in recording details about his artistic output. He was more likely to list his subjects individually and to single out exotic and unusual sitters like “Wha-Shing, a Chinese gentleman,” “John Smith a dwarf 18 years old,” and “Mr. Harry Gates of Hubbardston,” whose “face was distorted by a wound on Bunker Hill.” He noted subjects who were especially difficult to paint, like an eighty-three-year-old woman who was “so feeble” she could only “sit in position” a few minutes at a time.34
Greenwood also began to record purchases that signaled attempts to cultivate his eye and to demonstrate his taste. He subscribed to Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio, which set itself up as a national arbiter of culture and the arts, and spent $25 to procure back issues. He purchased the published works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, including the Discourses, which provided a civic justification for art and codified the eighteenth-century Anglo-American aesthetic. He stepped up his acquisition of engraved prints and copies of European paintings and began to purchase plaster busts. By the end of 1817, he was able to boast that, notwithstanding several months’ illness, he had managed to “increase my Library, my collection of painting, prints, statuary &c. very considerably.”35
The entries in Greenwood’s journal are so terse that it is tempting to treat the whole as an account book for tracking pictures painted and objects purchased. But if the journal functioned on that level—and it certainly did, especially after he opened the New England Museum—it also bore witness to Greenwood’s visual engagement with the world and his sustained attempts to develop his taste. The acquisition of things and experiences, like the notations that fixed them in his journal, served as a kind of commonplacing. Both sets of practices internalized a conventional set of aesthetic values and marked his growing connoisseurship. And both enabled him to position himself as someone who looked out at the world from the perspective of the tasteful few.
Occasionally his looking was dilatory and aimless, as it was on the December afternoon when he recorded that he “went to auction a little, & elsewhere a little, & thus littled away the day.” But generally it was purposeful and directed. He sought out private collections in and around Boston, the better to learn from others’ taste. Thus he traveled the ten miles to Milton to see the elegant paintings belonging to Miss Lucy Smith, a woman distinguished by her “good sense and elegant manner” and “Waited on Miss Hannah Adams” in order to see “Bonaparte’s pictures, St. Domingo,