Two Yankee Painters in Italy: Thomas Cole and Samuel Morse

Abstract

SURVEYING the long record of American painters in Italy, from Benjamin West and John Copley in the eighteenth century to Eugene Berman and Loren MacIver in our time, one concludes that Italian influence upon our art and consequently upon our culture has been determined not only by the personal motives of the artists and their capacity to assimilate what Italy offered, but also at any given time by the character of the American society from which the painter came and to which, with few exceptions, he returned. West in 1760 and Copley in 1774 were talented provincials who could not be content with the meager artistic training and the limited patronage of Philadelphia and Boston. West believed that only by firsthand study of the old masters could one rise above mere portraitmaking to attempt the higher and nobler forms of art; and his Roman visit was essential to his purpose: to combine the graceful drawing and design of Raphael with the light-and-shade of Correggio and the color of Titian, until every borrowed grace became his own. Copley's ambition was nourished by engravings from Italian masters and by a few clumsy copies which Smibert and West had made. When can get disengaged from this frozen region, he wrote, I shall take my flight to Europe, shall there be heated with the light of the enchanting works of a Raphael, a Rubens, Coregio [sic] and a Veronese. Having made the Italian pilgrimage, both West and Copley spent the rest of their lives as distinguished and influential members of the British School, with only an occasional nostalgic thought of the country from which they had detached themselves. Artistic migrations to Italy in the nineteenth century were of another