West, Copley, and Eighteenth-Century American Provincialism

Abstract

It is a common notion that American painting in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was derivative and provincial. It was an artistic period marked by failure and frustration during which the promising artist, usually after a study tour in Europe, was met with indifference or misunderstanding. He either just managed to scrape a living, often by having to compromise his talents in search of an audience, or was forced to abandon painting altogether and turn to other pursuits. The only successful American painters, in this view, were those who became established in Europe; and they somehow no longer seem to be American. The best of the group were Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, whose European careers have been consistently misunderstood, until very recently, through geographical and historical myopia. European art historians have given them short shrift because they were, after all, provincial painters with the good fortune to practise in a European capital. American art historians have neglected their European work because (from the American point of view) it was English art they practised.