Benjamin West & Thomas Eakins

As a newly settled frontier area that shared in the culture of an older, dominant power, the American Colonies and, later, the United States of America expended a great deal of effort in defining themselves as a separate cultural entity. Perhaps it was not even until the United States had become a dominant power itself that America felt free of the shadows cast by its ancestors. A comparison of works by two American painters will give some idea of how the this process of self-definition worked. Benjamin West (1738-1820), the most successful American painter of the eighteenth century, was a friend of King George III and his official history painter. West was also a founder and the second President of the Royal Academy and had one of the most successful careers of any painter of his time. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) worked in relative obscurity. He was a successful teacher, though finally unable to deal with the constraints of teaching, but his career never brought him much fame, wealth, or influence. Eakins' success has been largely posthumous and he is regarded by many as the greatest of all American realist painters. In learning their craft both painters turned toward Europe. West became a part of European movements and styles as both an early advocate of Neoclassicism and, much later, a Romantic painter. Eakins, however, held back and struggled to develop a mode of expression that was entirely his own and specifically American. The two painters' careers say a great

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ss. In 1758 an American writer published a poem praising Wollaston and the last ten lines of the poem were directed to West who was told to "Copy each grace, and learn like him to shine".8 This praise and the hope the author expressed for West clearly revolve around the imitation of European models. But the portrait occupied a unique place in the American colonies. A portrait possessed the obvious quality of a luxury item since it was definitely not, like a silver teapot. "an investment commodity".9 As Lovell notes, the portrait has always demanded "socially legible, repeated formal elements to fulfill its role as a mnemonic, socially organizing device"10 The demands placed on the portrait included, of course, statements regarding the wealth, possessions, social standing, talents, and abilities of the sitters. According to Breen, Colonial America had become a vital marketplace for British manufactured goods and the American market was obsessed with possessing as many of these goods as it could. One of the prime examples of such goods was the factory-made cloth that could only be gotten easily from England. "Americans developed a good eye for textiles" and the portrait was one of the places where these imported fabrics we

Category: Arts - B