Conclusion: National Identity and Visual Culture in America

The subject of America's and American national identity has been at the heart of written criticism and political speculation, since the founding of the nation.1 Scholars have tried to define the "American character," as have commentators both foreign and domestic. British and European observers, such as Alexander de Tocqueville, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Fanny Kemble, Charles Dickens, and others have retained much of their relevance as historians. They provide enduring and piercing insights into gauging and understanding that "animal" with the prefix American; moreover, they wondered at the bounty, natural beauty, and diversity of the North American continent. As Joshua Taylor, the first director of what is now named the Smithsonian American Art Museum, noted in his bicentennial book of essays America as Art (1976), "European visitors, in fact, not concerned with the physical problems of creating a productive livelihood in a new land, were initially more appreciative of the particularly rugged aspects of American nature than were the local inhabitants" (100). American authors, ranging from the early American novelists of a mythic past populated by noble savages, such as James Fenimore Cooper, and to American novelists seeking to identify what was particularly "American" about Americans, like Mark Twain, were soon supplemented by scholars seeking to understand the America and its ascribed exceptionalism. Indeed, the shrewd essayist, de Crevecoeur, took on that subject before the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in his Letters from An American Farmer (1872). However, it is in the visual arts, the common denominator of the preceding articles, that this question seems to have first appeared. Even before the Revolution, as is often related, the Pennsylvania-born and Philadelphia-raised Benjamin West moved to England and eventually came to hold the two impressive titles of Official History Painter to King George III and President of the Royal Academy. Although he became one of the most important painters in Great Britain, and though he never returned to his native land after leaving for Italy at the age of twenty-two in 1760, he nonetheless refused knighthood after the Revolution because titles were alien to the American way of life and constitutional order. Many young men left the colonies to study with West in England before, during, and after the War for Independence, with a few emulating their teachers by becoming expatriates. Instead, most returned to employ their newly developed skills in documenting the appearance of their countrymen and the great events of their time. Among the latter was the young Matthew Pratt. Although a minor artist, his best known painting, The American School (1765), represents a significant commentary on prerevolutionary identity and the arts. In this painting, West appears with a number of his students, including Pratt, the teacher wearing a rather modest outfit and a three-cornered, Quaker-style hat. It is highly unlikely that West would retain Quaker dress six years after leaving Philadelphia, and there is even less certainty that all the students presented were even from the Colonies. But Pratt is making a pointed statement here about the identity and independence from British fashion and absorption more than a decade before the War for Independence. Broadsides, graphics, and other combinations of the printed word and image had a lively life during the later Colonial and the early Federal periods, with much greater attention to the lives and foibles of people than did the so-called fine arts. Whether showing people in a street scene or a battle in progress, these graphic expressions reached many people for whom the fine arts were beyond their reach and outside their experience. Many of the posters and penny prints were political in nature (the battle prints of Paul Revere come to mind), although a goodly number also provided portraits of civic leaders and war heroes to a substantial cross-section of the public. …