of the forces behind the eventual revolutions in America and France. When the new American system was inaugurated it was held to incorporate a "high regard for man's reason and for man's capacity through the exercise of reason to create a better world" and a particular "vision of antiquity," based largely on wishful thinking, was the "prototype of that world" (Prown 205).
The Federalist neoclassical style responded to all three of the problems faced by American art. Its classical shapes and motifs and its spare, cool lines and surfaces deliberately rebuked the ornamentation that characterized the royal courts of Europe. But it also reached beyond Versailles to a historical past that grounded Americans in history but denied any inherent connection to the corruptions of the intervening systems. In moral terms the abstract and geometrical attributes of Neoclassical design "are assertions of the dominion of mind" over the baser pleasures of the senses perceived by John Adams and many Americans as residing in the sensuous elaborations and exaggerations of organic forms found in the Baroque and Rococo (Prown 205).
In terms of the American taste for the specific the Neoclassical style was limited in terms of painting by the lack of funds for large scale decorative schemes and public sculpture consisted of allegorical figures. History painting, universally regarded by Europeans as the highest form of the art, had already undergone a great change due in large part to the American painter Benjamin West. West had, against the "adamant protestations" of Joshua Reynolds, introduced the "specific" into history painting in his The Death of Wolfe (1770) (Novak 41). This was a major step toward the specificity of emotion and occasion that was
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