Architectural Style Following the Revolutionary War

In the decades following the Revolutionary War Americans felt called upon to reaffirm the concepts on which their fight for freedom had been based. Thus the broadest trend in art and architecture was toward the severe neoclassical style that spoke of virtue and a fresh approach to the problem of organizing society. In the years after the Civil War the nation was also undergoing an adjustment, but this time the change was not related to political organization but to the radical changes inherent in the industrialization and rapidly expanding wealth of the young country. The response was an overwhelming growth in the arts accompanied by a split in sensibilities between those looking for an art that put a seal of cultural approval on industrial growth--usually turning to European models--and those who adhered to a more local vision.

Despite the differences between the two postwar periods, however, certain questions or problems persisted. The first might be called the problem of Europe, the second the problem of the moral implications of art, and the third the choice to be made between the universal and the specific. In the years after the War of Independence these issues were strongly interconnected. As future president John Adams wrote to his wife while visiting France, "I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue, in all times and countries" (quoted in Prown 208). The suspicion that the Rococo elegance of Versailles and Paris was incompatible with

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d to "reform the evil institutions that had corrupted all of humanity [and] demonstrate to the whole world the perfectibility of man" (Flexner 85). The "aristocratic pretensions" of the wealthy Federalists could not be satisfied by the plainer, more severe presentation of Washington in Stuart's unadorned bust-length portraits and the Landsdowne Portrait, in which Washington stands like a European monarch amid a crowd of symbolic devices, was more to their taste. But the brilliance of Stuart's fundamentally realistic painting, with its tenuousness of forms and brilliance at capturing the interaction of light and surface was exerting a much stronger appeal to American audiences than this rather faked-up kind of American royal portrait. The growing conflict between the Federalist vision of an oligarchy and more populist trends can be seen in Stuart's own conflict over style. As Wilmerding points out, Stuart's Mrs. Perez Morton, with its brilliant sketchiness and its profound revelation of character remained unfinished (as did a large number of his later works) and it unfinished state, displaying Stuart's ambiguity about subjecting its intense emotional quality to an elegant finish, is emblematic of "the unstable tensions running

Category: Arts - A