A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz

Abstract

Reviewed by: A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz Kara M. French (bio) William Walcutt, Art, Early American art, Nativism A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art. By Wendy Jean Katz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022, Pp. 226.) Questions of who gets to call themselves a "real" American and whose histories should be centered have saturated the political arena in recent years. In the atmosphere of these heated debates, Wendy Jean Katz's analysis of nativism's ties to nineteenth-century art and artists appears very relevant. Examining the career of popular nineteenth-century artist William Walcutt—a man Katz accurately describes as "nativist adjacent" if not a card-carrying Know-Nothing—and his circle allows for a deeper understanding of how pervasive nativist ideals and symbols were in the illustrations, engravings, banners, and sculptures in the visual vernacular of the 1840s and 50s (xii). A True American goes beyond the more familiar and obvious tropes of nativist ideology—exaggerated caricatures of Irish and German immigrants or scheming Jesuits locking women in convents—to show how even seemingly innocuous displays of the eagle or Thanksgiving celebrations were part of a larger nativist symbology. Katz argues that "the most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about American democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary ideas about citizenship" (xiii). It was an art that centered the heroism of white Anglo–Saxon Protestant men while relegating women, the enslaved, and people of color to supporting roles, often ushering them out of the frame entirely. William Walcutt and his fellow working artists are likely not as familiar to scholars of the early republic as their fine art contemporaries in the Hudson River School or notable historical painters like John Trumbull or Daniel Huntington. Katz, however, makes a strong case that these men (and they were almost entirely men) represent a kind of "norm" in antebellum art, a norm that was increasingly becoming suffused with nativist ideas of "true Americanism" (xiii). Though Walcutt did gain some fame as a sculptor and illustrator in his own time, he and his circle were more aligned [End Page 187] with what today would be described as commercial art. To be clear, A True American is not a strict biography of Walcutt per se, but a larger study of a circle of artists whose sympathies were more aligned to those of their fellow working-class artisans than fine artists supported by elite patrons. Walcutt was born in Ohio, the descendant of frontiersmen and Revolutionary-era veterans. After working in the Midwest alongside his two brothers who were also artists, Walcutt arrived in New York City in 1847, an environment flush with artistic patronage as well as one in flux from both immigration and the disruptions of the market revolution. One of the most notable contributions of A True American is Katz's detailed analysis of the overlapping circles of working artists like Walcutt, fraternal orders, and nativist organizations. While the rise of fraternal organizations as well as the new cultural industries of the early republic have been well documented, Katz's work allows us to re-envision artistic societies like Walcutt's New York Sketch Club as fraternal organizations rather than just as gatherings of creatives. In doing so, the first two chapters of A True American help expand notions of who counts as a working-class artisan—beyond the usual shoemakers and tailors displaced by industrialization, one must include artists themselves. Not only did this circle of artists often contribute illustrations to nativist publications like America's Own and paint banners for Odd Fellows' lodges, they also provided mutual aid and shared a sense of their own artistic "brotherhood" standing against both capitalist and foreign tyranny. This was particularly acute for American-born artists like Walcutt who believed that American art should be native-grown and commissions reserved for native-born Americans, rather than more well-known European artists who had trained in academies abroad. Walcutt's circle was opposed to the creation of academies of fine arts within the United States, believing them to be hierarchical and anti...