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 deal about the American quest for cultural self-definition and demonstrate how these men exemplified many of the prevailing attitudes of their times toward art, culture, Europe, and America.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, in The House of Seven Gables, "Shall we never get rid of this past? It lies upon the present like a giant's dead body." According to Hawthorne, Americans were enslaved by the past and were blocked in their choices by its dead weight. Hawthorne...