Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

the first half of My Egotistigraphy, Harding sketches the artist as a self-made everyman.⁵¹

      Some thirty years before his family coaxed the Egotistigraphy out of him, Harding told his story differently. In a long letter written for inclusion in Dunlap’s History, Harding recounted his transformation from sign painter to portrait painter in terms that drew sharp distinctions between painting signs (“a useful art,” “a vocation”) and painting faces (a “profession,” an “honourable” profession, a “newly discovered goddess”). In the narrative he produced for Dunlap, Harding traveled constantly not to earn money but to educate his eyes. He went from Kentucky to Philadelphia in order to spend “five or six weeks in looking at the portraits of Mr. Sully and others”; a few years later, a trip to Boston was “chiefly … a pilgrimage to Stuart.” Trips to the East Coast were intended to hone his eye rather than his technique. Visual acuity naturally resulted in technical acuity.⁵²

      Harding took pains to define himself as a “self-taught” artist in ways that removed his work and, by extension, himself from the ranks of mere craftsmen. Speculating on the success he enjoyed in Boston in the 1820s, when he claimed to have attracted more sitters than Gilbert Stuart, he considered the possibility that affluent patrons were attracted by the novelty of sitting for a painter who was a “backwoodsman, newly caught.” Patrons and “superficial observers,” he concluded, invested the phrase “self-taught artist” with misplaced cachet. More knowledgeable judges, he sniffed, understood the label as a symbol of labor, signaling “no other virtue … than that of perseverance.” But for his part, Harding used the term only to indicate that he did not have “any particular instructor”; he did not owe his success to the tutelage of a Benjamin West or an Edward Savage.⁵³ Sidestepping the manual labor suggested by “perseverance,” he explained, “It matters little how an artist arrives at a sort of midway elevation, at which all with common industry may arrive.” What counted was genius, which enabled someone like himself to soar “above the common level,” leaving “his less favoured brethren to follow in his track with mingled feelings of envy and admiration.”⁵⁴

      Harding realized his genius not as an itinerant canvassing the American frontier, but as an explorer surveying a “wilderness of art” in London. At first, he confessed, the overwhelming number and variety of paintings dulled his senses, making him “indifferent to all the sublime works that were within my reach.” Still, he persisted in looking and “by degrees” began to “see new beauties every day” in the Old Masters. Just as his eyes began to open, his money began to run out. He fell back on portraiture to support himself and immediately attracted a devoted and aristocratic clientele. His sitters provided much more than cash; they ushered him into a world of exquisite taste and sumptuous art collections. Noble patrons invited him to spend weeks at the “splendid” Hamilton Palace, seat of the Duke of Hamilton and home to one of the finest picture galleries in Great Britain. They enabled him to visit Holkham Hall, a seat of “luxury and elegance” belonging to the Coke family. There, he told Dunlap, his mornings “were chiefly spent looking at the ‘old masters,’” his afternoons in hunting wild game, and his evenings benefiting from the dinner conversation of the aristocrats, politicians, and artists who were congregated around the seventy-year-old Lord Coke and Coke’s twenty-one-year-old wife. For readers of the History, Harding cast the time spent at England’s magnificent country houses as leisurely opportunities to soak up art, taste, and what he called the “high life.”⁵⁵

      In fact, Harding’s forays to these storied estates were, at best, busman’s holidays. The account he penned for Dunlap bears slight resemblance to the one he recorded in his diary, which reveals him as a laborer, albeit an elevated one. He noted that his first attempt to gain admission to Hamilton Palace was rebuffed, despite the fact that he carried a letter of introduction from the Duke of Sussex, because the family was “constantly annoyed” by inquiries from vendors and tradesmen of all sorts. During the two weeks he spent at Holkham Hall, he painted four portraits, including a “kit-cat”-sized likeness of “Mr. Blakie, Mr. Coke’s Steward.” A working artist, he was constantly at his easel. His status was confirmed in the Holkham Hall account books, which list him as a “limner.”⁵⁶

      Harding’s inflated account of the time he spent in England was a savvy business strategy. His immersion in the world of Old Masters and tasteful aristocrats was calculated to enhance his American reputation. It seems to have worked. In the coda Dunlap added to Harding’s “frank and manly” letter, he took pains to celebrate the former “backwoodsman” as a gentleman, possessed of pleasing manners and appearance, who had purchased his “own beautiful country seat.” And he confirmed Harding’s account of himself with a personal recollection: Years earlier, Harding had called on Dunlap in his painting room, introduced himself, and provided “proof of a true eye and taste” by “immediately” picking out “the best head” Dunlap had set out for display. Together, Dunlap and Harding gave readers a portrait of the artist as a man defined by his eye and by his taste.⁵⁷

      Why did thirty years make such a difference in the way Harding told his story? In 1834, seven years after returning from Britain, he was solvent but hardly renowned. He was still rebuilding his network of Boston-based patrons and making a name for himself as a painter of statesmen in Washington, D.C. Naturally, he was keen to distance himself from his earlier, backwoods persona. With one eye trained on potential patrons and the other on fellow artists, the Harding of 1834 was bent on establishing his credentials as a man who warranted inclusion in the History not because of where he came from but because of what he had become. By 1865, Harding wrote for an audience of family and friends that included men of influence from New England to Washington, D.C. He counted John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Daniel Webster, John Marshall, and Bushrod Washington among his clients. Secure in his social, financial, and professional success, Harding could frame his life story as a distinctly American picaresque. Then, too, around midcentury many Americans had begun to turn away from romantic conceptions of the artist, endorsing instead the ideal of the artist as a hardheaded businessman. By 1865, the life story of an artist whose self-making depended on the work of his hands as much as his eyes and whose self-fashioning resulted as much from time spent in Paris, Kentucky, as time spent in Paris, France, had an appeal that it lacked in the 1830s. Both the 1834 narrative and the 1865 narrative depict an artist in the American grain. Placed side by side, they show us how much that grain had changed.⁵⁸

      Life Among the Connoisseurs