Opportunities to exercise one’s taste—to scan the surroundings with a knowing and receptive eye—increased in variety and quantity during the early republic. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, bourgeois Americans acquired access to more books and magazines, more paintings and prints, more museums and galleries. They encountered a visual field that was increasingly crowded, courtesy of an expanding consumer market. The language that women and men used to describe their aesthetic experiences offers one register of the growing influence of commerce, commodities, and consumer capitalism. Consider the word “taste” itself. A key word in the eighteenth-century British aesthetic lexicon, “taste” appeared in political treatises, oratory, and children’s books. It also made regular appearances in letters written by and to the nation’s founders: Jefferson urged the design of a capitol that would “form the taste of our young men,” and he fretted over how John Adams’s “want of taste” would be received in Europe. For his part, Adams took pains to distinguish between the artificial “Amuzements” and the “higher Taste” displayed in England’s romantic country gardens. Even George Washington hailed Julius Caesar as a “man of highly cultivated understanding and taste.”15 These men, like their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic, invoked “taste” in reference to physical sensations as well as to individual preferences and predilections; they used it to describe the appreciation of beauty in nature, art, and literature. “Taste” was an elastic word, conjuring an individual’s reactions to endless external stimuli. But for all its value as an index of the external world, taste was also deeply and intrinsically internalized. This, in fact, was precisely what made taste so potent for men like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington: it simultaneously summoned gentility and moral character.
Not so the word “connoisseurship.” If taste depended upon fundamentally internalized qualities and abilities, connoisseurship derived solely from a familiarity with objects outside the self. Connoisseurs were distinguished by their knowledge of category and quality, by their expertise in a world of goods. Defined by his or her relationship to particular things, the connoisseur was a creature of the market. It is telling that the same founders who never hesitated to appeal to taste rarely invoked connoisseurship; when they did, it was usually to declare that they lacked it. Thus Washington confessed that he was “not much of a connoisseur” of dinner plates and “profess[ed] not to be a connoisseur” of poetry. Jefferson was “so little of a connoisseur” that he found the paintings of Adriaen van der Werff and Carlo Dolci superior to those of Peter Paul Rubens.16 To be sure, there was always the whiff of gamesmanship in disavowals like these. A preference for Dolci over Rubens might have ruffled the feathers of connoisseurs, but it also trumpeted a far deeper knowledge of art history than most Americans or Britons could claim. But by pointedly distancing themselves from connoisseurs, Jefferson and Washington implicitly juxtaposed connoisseurship’s studied pretense against taste’s authentic simplicity in order to announce themselves as republicans and to lay claim to an aesthetic and moral high ground.
Suspect in the eighteenth century, “connoisseur” and its variations triumphed in the nineteenth. Americans seized on the word to describe their connection to the material world. The early national periodical press provides a rough index of the ascent of the connoisseur. Initially, the word was associated solely with high culture and the fine arts. Connoisseurs judged painting, sculpture, and (much less frequently) literature; their approbation was invoked in announcements for gallery exhibitions and essays on Benjamin West’s oeuvre and Henry Fuseli’s lectures on painting.17 But the range of objects that commanded the connoisseur’s attention quickly expanded beyond the exquisite and the rare to include the everyday and the accessible. Newspaper and magazine advertisements invited connoisseurs to peruse engraved prints, perfumes, and wines or to enjoy mechanical panoramas, philosophical experiments, and turtle soup.18 Arkansas land, merino sheep, cream cheese, and a special shade of red that could be produced only with a dye made from sheep’s dung—all provided fodder for connoisseurs.19 “Connoisseurship” never eclipsed “taste.” Indeed, the two words were often linked. Eventually, they became all but synonymous. Nor was the exercise of taste ever entirely divorced from the material world. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century ascendance of “connoisseur,” a word that appeared only rarely in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, should alert us to the increasingly active and volatile presence of the market in the republic of taste.
The market ensured that the very visual and material cultures that helped materialize the United States’ republic of taste also served to undermine it. The republic of taste had always been an abstraction, an idea. Like all theories, it proved vulnerable to praxis. Yet as it was imagined and constituted in the United States, this particular abstraction proved to be especially vulnerable to the material forms that were meant to embody and to shape it. For one thing, most of the texts and objects that structured the world of taste, even in its most allegedly American iterations, were European or, more likely, British in origin. An exclusively “American taste” was an oxymoron. Sovereignty produced neither cultural nor economic autonomy. Most Anglo-Americans did a very good job of overlooking the extent to which their tasteful texts and things derived from English originals. That said, Englishness (and the recent history of political rupture and economic dependency it implied) popped up more than anyone might have liked. Put simply, U.S. citizens’ continued reliance on British texts, objects, images, and styles complicated their narratives about national distinctiveness and disrupted their claims about a singularly American republic of taste.20
More to the point, regardless of provenance, most of the objects and images constituting the American republic of taste were commodities. Circulating across the Atlantic and within the United States, taste’s props were part of a protean consumer market that was both a source and a symbol of political, economic, and social change. Commodification undermined the lofty promises held out by the abstraction of taste not because it produced tawdry, tacky goods (although it assuredly did) or because it extended taste’s compass across all sectors of society, thereby democratizing national culture (which it did not). Instead, commodification created the space for an imaginary that transgressed the unifying, disciplinary logic that undergirded the republic of taste.
Painters, museum keepers, printers, and producers of aestheticized objects more generally might have aspired to serve the republic by elevating citizens’ taste. But they were also entrepreneurs who needed to make a living and tried to make a good one. Competing in increasingly crowded markets, they clamored to attract new clients by catering to a growing range of preferences and budgets. They angled to attract repeat business by catering to the public’s desire for novelty. The resulting variety of goods ran the gamut from the ephemeral to the substantial. Promising only to suit the particular taste of individual patrons, producers made no claim to advancing a single standard of taste, much less yoking consumers to a particular form of collective identity or action.21 The commodification of taste was by no means unique to the United States. But precisely because Anglo-Americans had endeavored to situate taste near the heart of the republican project, its commodification bore different and more urgent implications in the United States than