Dunlap’s autobiography spells out what his early self-portraits imply. He returns repeatedly to sight in his account of his early years and his decision to become a painter, which occupies the first third of the narrative. The only child of “indulgent” parents, he received “no education in the usual acceptation of the word.” His boyhood schooling was interrupted first by war and then by injury. The latter interruption was the one that mattered: While playing outside with a group of boys who were pitching wood chips at one another, Dunlap was hit in the face and his right eye was “cut longitudinally.” “Weeks of confinement to my bed and more to my house” sufficed to restore his health, he recalled, but he never regained “the sight of the organ” (244, 250). During his convalescence and after, Dunlap developed a taste for drawing. By the time he recovered, his copies of engraved prints borrowed from the neighbors “might almost pass” for the originals.
Figure 12. Charles Cromwell Ingham, William Dunlap, 1838–1839. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. Courtesy of the National Academy Museum.
Encouraged by the admiration these drawings solicited, Dunlap settled on painting as his profession. The war made it difficult to secure a regular teacher, so he resolved to learn by doing. He painted his father first, moved on to other relatives, and when he had exhausted his supply of family, he turned to his friends. The moment he began to get applications from strangers, he “fixed [his] price as three guineas a-head” and “thus commenced portrait-painter in the year 1782” (250–251). To be sure, this was something less than a serious bid at a livelihood. “Living as the only and indulged child of my parents” removed the pressure of subsistence, he explained. But Dunlap’s efforts were promising enough that by 1784, his father was willing to send him to London to study with Benjamin West.
West did his best by Dunlap. He confirmed the young man’s talent on the basis of his “specimens”; helped him secure cheap lodgings with Robert Davy, a portraitist and art teacher; loaned him plaster casts to draw; and secured his admission to the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, as Dunlap explained, a trip that should have gone a long way toward securing his future career as an artist proved a fiasco. Hours that should have been spent in the studio were wiled away in drinking, dining, and then drinking some more. Entire weeks were dissolved into visits to the theater and pleasure trips into the countryside. Dunlap abandoned Davy’s rooms (and Davy’s tutelage) for more fashionable quarters and took up with a group of “half-pay officers” fresh from America who congregated at a local porterhouse (257–262). He never studied at the academy and although he was a regular guest at West’s dinner table, he managed to avoid his purported teacher’s studio almost entirely. He completed a few paintings—portraits and historical pieces—but saw little progress. This “life of unprofitable idleness” came to an abrupt end in 1787 when his father heard about his antics and summoned him home (265–266).
Looking back on what he judged a misspent youth, Dunlap found much to regret. And as he considered his failure, he returned time and again to his inability to see the world with a painter’s eye. Color posed the most fundamental obstacle. Because he taught himself to draw by copying engraved prints in ink, Dunlap worried that his “eye became satisfied with light and shadow” and learned to care little for “the excitement of colour.” He imagined that early intervention in the form of a knowledgeable teacher might have helped him to overcome this hurdle. But that was all in the realm of the hypothetical. Whether “from nature,” or injury, or training, he “did not possess a painter’s eye for colour” (250).
Unfortunately, his experiences in England only confirmed a shortsightedness that should have been apparent before he left New York. The nadir came during one of the few lessons West managed to give Dunlap. While painting a landscape, the great artist “elucidated the doctrine of light and shadow,” a doctrine “long … familiar to every artist.” First, West drew a circle on a blank canvas, then touched in light and shadow with white and black chalk, leaving the canvas itself to show the “half-tint and reflexes.” Next he directed Dunlap to examine the patterns of light and shadow on a piece of statuary to observe how the theory worked in practice. To extend the lesson from black and white to a full range of color, West returned the young man to his own unfinished landscape, pointing out that the “masses of foliage … were painted on the same principle.” The lesson was humiliating. That West felt compelled to return his prodigal student to first principles was “perhaps proof of the little progress I had made in the art I professed to study.” Once again, Dunlap demonstrated that he had a “better eye for form than for color” and was “discouraged by finding that I did not perceive the beauty or effect of colors as others appeared to do” (258–259).
Whatever the cause of Dunlap’s poor eye for color, it quickly became a metaphor for his poor taste and poor judgment more generally. The aspiring artist was all but blind to the art that surrounded him in London. On his first visit to West’s London studio, Dunlap remembered passing through a long gallery “hung with sketches and designs” that opened into a high-ceilinged room filled with “gigantic paintings” before entering the studio proper. “I gazed, with all the wonder of ignorance and the enthusiasm of youth upon the paintings,” he recalled. There was no overcoming this well-intentioned gawking. Despite living amidst “wonders of art,” he remained “blind as a savage.” In and around London, he “looked upon pictures without the necessary knowledge that would have made them instructive” (256). On an expedition to Burghley House, whose grounds had been designed by the picturesque landscape architect Capability Brown and whose rooms housed more than five hundred paintings, Dunlap took in pictures of “Madonnas and Bambinos, and Magdalens and Cruxifictions,” which “did not advance me one step” (263). The dazzling collection of the Duke of Marlborough offered “some pleasure” but “little profit.” After three years of this futile looking, his father summoned him home to New York. There, he was greeted by his father’s slaves, whose “black faces, white teeth, and staring eyes” held up a mirror to Dunlap’s own failure of vision (266). Despite the finest opportunities money could buy, William Dunlap returned little changed from the youth who had once “admired [Charles Willson] Peale’s gallery of pictures” simply because his ignorance led him “to admire every thing” (251).
Chester Harding succeeded where William Dunlap failed, and against far longer odds. Born into a rural New England household that lacked money, education, and pedigree, Harding had looked to the military, tavern keeping, and chair making for his livelihood before he learned to paint. He began with signs and moved on to portraits. Eventually, as his skill and reputation increased, he became one of the most successful academic-style portraitists working in the antebellum North.48 Harding told the story of his remarkable rise twice. He wrote the best-known version, My Egotistigraphy, in 1865, near the end of his life, at the behest of his children and friends. Harding tells his life story in the first half of the memoir; in the book’s second half, letters and diary entries piece together his travels through Europe.
The Harding who comes to life in the first half of the Egotistigraphy is the one everyone remembers, and with good reason. This Harding is as unpretentious as he is funny. He gets rich but never forgets his humble beginnings. He pokes good-natured fun at his clients’ airs even as he values their trade. His is a workaday account of how he learned to paint and how he turned his genuine love of the practice into a lucrative career. There are no high-falutin’ claims to genius, no paeans to taste. Indeed, those two words are all but absent from the first half of the memoir, although they turn up often enough in the diaries that Harding kept while he was abroad.49
To be sure, Harding was alive to the magic of a good likeness. He began to paint portraits after becoming “enamored” with the second-rate efforts of an itinerant he hired to paint him and his wife. The prospect of painting consumed him; he “thought of it by day and dreamed of it by night.” And when Harding made his own stab at a portrait, a picture of his wife, he “became frantic with delight; it was like the discovery of a new sense I could think of nothing else.”50 But his growing ambition, an ambition first articulated as the desire to become a painter