This book weaves together two related lines of inquiry in order to explore Americans’ contradictory attempts to create and inhabit a republic of taste. The first explores the process of translating aesthetic ideals into everyday practice. How could a transatlantic culture of taste be rendered American? How could it be refined to meet the pressing needs of the republic? Just as important, how could women and men secure their claims to inclusion in this American republic of taste? And how could they use that status to consolidate their authority in the American republic writ large? As urgent as they were unresolved, these questions dogged attempts to create a culture capable of securing the republic. To forge an American republic of taste, individuals reinvested older ideas, imaginative structures, and material forms with new meanings. Capitalizing on taste’s promises to identify and elevate the worthy few, women and men projected their aspirations for themselves onto their aspirations for the republic, thereby collapsing the personal and the national. Capitalizing on taste’s penchant for distinction, they guarded the boundaries that elevated them above those who lacked their fine eyes and genteel sensibilities. To be sure, Anglo-Americans had been using taste (along with gentility and sensibility) as an instrument of social calibration since at least the early eighteenth century.22 But following the Revolution, they also used it as a barometer of civic and political capacity. During the same decades, the expansion of the market guaranteed that there were more producers and more consumers, more images, objects, and texts jockeying for recognition and precedence. Americans thus sought to materialize their republic of taste in a social, economic, and cultural context that was inherently unstable, a context that all but guaranteed that attempts to create a republic of taste would ultimately undermine it.
The book’s second line of inquiry focuses on the connections that early national Americans drew between visual and material cultures, on the one hand, and literary cultures, on the other. Republic of Taste is as concerned with texts, and texts that refer to things, as it is with things in and of themselves. This is intentional. Recent years have witnessed exciting work both on visual and material cultures and on literary culture.23 That said, we have a remarkably underdeveloped sense of how the textual, the visual, and the material operated together. This is unfortunate, for in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the visual and the textual were interwoven in distinct and specific ways.
An expansive, transatlantic literary culture provided educated women and men with structures for organizing visual perception, structures that operated much like the carefully mapped sight lines in a theater, which simultaneously ensure that audiences see the action on the stage and discourage them from peering into the spaces around them. These structures were as disciplinary as they were enabling. Belles lettres endowed readers with far more than the vocabulary necessary to translate a sweeping field of vision into words. The rich textual world elaborated in manuscript and print, in private exchange and public academies, showed women and men where and how to look and then helped them anchor what they saw in the things they read and wrote. The densely knit web of associations that emerged from all this reading, writing, and looking—the particular form of subjectivity it created—was hardly a natural effect of human nature. Instead, it was historically specific, grounded both in ideas about perception and selfhood and in an expansive world of images, objects, and texts.24 This dynamic, triangular process was central to the ways in which individuals experienced, understood, and valued texts, images, and objects. It proved crucial to attempts to imagine the United States as a republic of taste.
The chapters that follow sketch the history of the American republic of taste. The story they tell does not aim to be comprehensive, as if such a story could be told comprehensively. Instead, its trajectory unfolds through a series of roughly chronological, topical chapters. Chapter 1 examines pedagogy and curriculum at postrevolutionary academies and seminaries to consider how ideas about taste, aesthetics, and seeing were introduced into the discursive and social practices of young women and men. Very little of this aesthetic education was new, and perhaps even less of it was unique to the United States. What was new in the years following the Revolution was the scale of the enterprise on the one hand and its political resonance on the other. Young men and young women, especially, increasingly pursued educations that injected ideas about aesthetics, habits of observation, and particular kinds of objects and images with an explicitly republican, explicitly national significance. Academy students, with their carefully schooled taste and their heightened sense of visuality, became newly visible to their fellow citizens as aestheticized embodiments of republican taste and virtue. The academy movement, as it is often called, produced several generations of students whose educations had imparted appetites as well as taste. Their desire to indulge their taste and exercise their eyes, a desire that continued long after they left school, was satisfied by growing numbers of painters, museum operators, and art teachers. These aesthetic entrepreneurs, the subject of Chapter 2, were eager to profit from the growing market for taste. But they were just as eager to claim some of their patrons’ respectability—some of their polish—for themselves. Eager to qualify for membership in the republic of taste, they celebrated their visual discernment rather than their technical skill. Setting themselves up as arbiters of their patrons’ taste, they were nonetheless vulnerable to patrons’ whims and pocketbooks.
Aesthetics, both as theory and praxis, thus served as a vehicle for people of different genders and ranks to consolidate their social, cultural, and even economic power in the early republic. But what kinds of authority, precisely, could taste enhance? What kinds of visibility could it engender? Chapter 3 focuses on miniature portraits of two women, one black and one white, to explore these questions. Portraits were, by a large margin, the most popular form of painting in early America. By the turn of the nineteenth century, ivory miniatures were arguably the most common form of likeness among members of a growing middle class. This extraordinarily successful medium was celebrated not least for its capacity to depict complexion. It was governed by aesthetic principles that put the ideals celebrated in the republic of taste in the service of visualizing and maintaining categories of race, gender, and class. The portraits of Elizabeth Freeman, a former slave, and Betsey Way Champlain, a working artist, illuminate how ubiquitous ivory miniatures helped shore up the hierarchies that structured the early republic. And yet the images in question were only partly successful in this regard. Read alongside an unusually rich documentary record, these portraits gesture both toward the fundamentally aspirational nature of an exclusionary American republic of taste and toward the challenges that could be leveled against it.
Ironically, the kinds of images, objects, and practices sketched in the book’s first half worked to undermine republican authority as often as they worked to shore it up. British originals gave the lie to fantasies about American exceptionalism, while the logic of the capitalist market made the meanings of goods as well as the uses to which they were put especially malleable. The timeless truths commemorated in the republic of taste were ultimately no match for the solvent of commodification. The chapters in the second half of the book trace the open-ended, unstable result of efforts to create an American republic of taste. In Chapter 4, a country villa opens up questions about the persistence of Anglophilia, the continued appeal of British commodities, and the problems posed by the reintegration of loyalists in the years following the war. The Woodlands, located just outside Philadelphia on a bluff overlooking the Schuylkill River, was the lifework of William Hamilton, a loyalist and confirmed Anglophile. By the 1790s, Hamilton had eased himself back into elite society, using his exquisite house and gardens to clear the path. Less than twenty years later, Hamilton’s estate was widely celebrated in paintings, prints, and published texts and manuscripts as proof that taste could and would flourish in a republic. The same visual, material, and literary cultures that secured The Woodlands a prominent place in a national, nationalist imaginary demonstrate how deeply contradictory that imaginary could be.
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