Traveling exhibitions offered Greenwood another opportunity for improvement. He took in panoramas of Paris, Constantinople, and the Battle of Waterloo, the last of which he attended with a fellow artist, Sarah Goodrich.38 When American painters with academic ambitions displayed their masterpieces in Boston, Greenwood was invariably on hand. In 1815, he paid to see Henry Sargent’s Landing of the Fathers, which depicted the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock, and he may well have supplemented his viewing by reading the New England Palladium and Commercial Advertiser, which offered its readers step-by-step instructions for studying the painting, carefully dissecting the appropriate movement of the eye over the canvas.39 A few months later, he made arrangements to exhibit Samuel Morse’s Dying Hercules when it arrived in Boston from the Royal Academy, where it had received “the highest approbation and applause.” He obtained both the enormous painting and the plaster model that Morse had made to help resolve the technical difficulties of representing the reclining figure. The exhibition, which took place in Greenwood’s painting rooms, generated revenue directly, through the 25-cent admission he charged, and indirectly, by increasing his visibility among potential clients. But housing the two pieces together also afforded Greenwood a rare opportunity for sustained, close study of a grand manner painting along with the even rarer opportunity to copy the painting by using the original painter’s method of looking back and forth between the three-dimensional model and two-dimensional canvas. The majestic painting had been in his rooms less than a week when he began to copy it. Whatever his profit from exhibiting the Dying Hercules, Greenwood made sure he capitalized on the chance to duplicate Morse’s method.40
On the rare occasions when Greenwood ventured outside New England, he recorded his attempts to consume the world with his eyes. The year before he opened the museum, he traveled south and, like other American travelers, recorded his experiences as a series of views: He was disappointed by the appearance of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a “Principally Dutch” town marked by “a want of elegance in everything, no taste in buildings, dress, or manner.” The moment he crossed into the slave South, the “misery and stupidity,” the “ignorance & total want of taste” were to be seen everywhere. When he entered Washington, D.C., he “saw its desolation & barrenness.” In livelier cities, his looking became far more urgent. He devoted himself “diligently to seeing every curious thing” in Baltimore; in New York, he vowed “to see & examine everything relating to the fine arts.” Over the course of a single month, he spent time at the Peale family’s museums in both Baltimore and Philadelphia; visited the studios of painters ranging from Charles Bird King to Mary Way; browsed bookstores, print shops, and gilders’ workshops; attended concerts and the theater; and toured the U.S. Mint and the Philadelphia Athenaeum.41
Subsequent trips to New York and Philadelphia found Greenwood equally determined to “view … every interesting curiosity I could meet with.” During a twelve-hour stay in New York City in 1821, he saw the gallery of wax figures at the Shakespeare Gallery, the Rotunda where John Vanderlyn displayed his panoramas, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, the Mechanical Theater, Scudder’s Museum (which he visited twice, once during the day and again at night), and the theater.42 A few years later, during a week divided between New York City and Philadelphia, Greenwood’s agenda included the Peale, Scudder, and Sharpless museums; a medical college museum; both the American Academy of the Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he saw “West’s great picture of Christ Healing the Sick”; and a morning in New York spent “in still further examination of everything curious with Col. Trumbull.” “In fact,” he wrote of this flying visit, “I looked at everything with all my might.”43
Like the curiosity cabinets assembled by wealthy collectors, these cities provided Greenwood with fodder for observation, consideration, and criticism. His compressed visits served, in heightened form, the same purpose as his more mundane habits of looking at home in Boston. The notations in his journal helped him to internalize the value of what he perceived and provided a forum for exercising his taste. Greenwood’s habits of looking and recording paid off: By 1821, the young man who had once hoped to “be improved” by Boston’s State House pictures could pick out the “good heads” in the Shakespeare Gallery and dismiss the rest as “gaudy trash.” He could commend the “elegance of arrangements & nature of the articles” in Scudder’s museum and regret that there was so very little at the American Academy of the Fine Arts to afford “entertainment or improvement.” By the time the journals end, in 1825, Ethan Allen Greenwood had become a connoisseur.44
If Greenwood’s journal gestures toward the central role that looking played in artistic self-fashioning, William Dunlap’s autobiography, published as part of his monumental History, expounds on it. The multivolume History unfolds mostly as a chronologically organized biographical compendium. Over the course of thirty chapters, he plumbs the lives of American artists, native born and otherwise, for insights about national character analogous to those that could be found in biographical compendia celebrating the nation’s founders. As he explains to readers in the book’s introduction, just as readers “earnestly desire to know every particular relative to the first settlers who raised the standard of civilization in the wilderness,” so, too, did they want to learn about the artists “who raised and who supported the standard of taste, and decorated the social column with its Corinthian capital.”45 Accordingly, the first volume of the History begins with colonial migrants like John Smibert and Robert Feke, picks up speed with Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, and assumes a distinctly national character with the ascendance of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and Dunlap himself.
Dunlap made no apologies for including himself in this pantheon and no apologies for taking up so many pages in it. His account of his own life is longer than his treatment of either Benjamin West or Gilbert Stuart and about the same as his coverage of Thomas Sully and Washington Allston combined. Dunlap began the History when he found himself in poor health and worse financial straits; his diary entries for the year leading up to the publication of his history of American art are a dismal catalog of diarrhea, laxatives, laudanum, and dwindling bank balances. Old and infirm, Dunlap may well have felt compelled to validate a career that had secured him neither economic stability nor public adulation.46
Why Dunlap chose to place his life story at the center of American art history matters less than how he told that story. In the History, he cast his life as an instructive flop. Where the lives of West, Copley, Trumbull, and Allston could help train up a young painter in the way he should go, Dunlap’s own conduct “stood as a beacon to be avoided by all.”47 He readily admitted that his was a failure of discipline, maturity, and nerve. But in the autobiography, Dunlap depicts these shortcomings as a failure of vision. The capacity for a certain kind of sight, he insisted, was the precondition for the creation and appreciation of art. It was also the quality that he himself most lacked.
Before Dunlap wrote about his problem, he painted it. He depicted his compromised vision in two miniature self-portraits, painted in 1805 and in 1812, years that saw him returning to art after failed stints in the theater. Both likenesses are dominated by the artist’s depiction of his eyes. The left eye is large, dark, and alert, whether it looks off into the distance or over his shoulder at the viewer. The right eye, blind as the result of a childhood accident, is clouded over. There is no iris, no pupil, and no mistaking this eye’s blindness. The absence of color signals the absence of sight. These portraits become more suggestive when paired against the portrait of Dunlap painted by Charles Cromwell Ingham for the National Academy of Design in 1838. Ingham’s likeness repeats the poses Dunlap had used on the miniatures. But in Ingham’s portrait, both eyes are large, dark, and apparently focused, as though reading. Ingham’s portrayal suggests that although Dunlap may have been blind in one eye, his appearance did not immediately announce the fact to observers who did not know him. Yet the inability to see mattered enough to Dunlap that he rendered it visible.