page_title: John Neal (writer)
section_title: Art criticism
hierarchical_section_title: John Neal (writer) / Writing / Art criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait painted in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 1823 by Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-1885) of eccentric writer, critic, and activist John Neal (1792-1876). Oil on canvas. From the New York Art Resource Consortium: http://nyarc-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=01NYARC&amp;search_scope=01NYARC_EVERYTHING&amp;docId=01NYARC_III.b11499679&amp;fn=permalink
context_page_description: John Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and wrote magazine essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the US and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages. Neal advanced the development of American art, advocated for early feminist causes, advocated the end of slavery and racism, and helped establish the gymnastics movement in the US.
  A pioneer of colloquialism and natural diction, John Neal is the first author to use "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of fiction. He attained his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, during which time he was central to American literature's evolution from the British influences dominant in works of founding American authors James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whom he derided, to the new voices of American Renaissance authors Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, all of whom he influenced.
context_section_description: John Neal first ventured into art criticism within his 1823 novel Randolph. Though he continued work in this field at least as late 1869, his chief impact and involvement outside his immediate geographic sphere was in the 1820s. Randolph, which Neal advertised as “a story in the form of letters, giving an account of our celebrities, orators, writers, painters, &c., &c.,” is based on his experience with the Peale family of Baltimore, and later earned him recognition as America’s first art critic. Neal around this time accessed Rembrandt Peale’s art museum, courted his daughter Rosalba Carriera Peale, and sat for portraits with his niece Sarah Miriam Peale.
  Though Neal’s role as an art critic at this time was overshadowed by his other vocations in literature and law, he was the first American to critique art effectively. Historian Harold Edward Dickson put it this way: “As much as for the artist lore he recorded, it is for the vigor and originality of his delivery and for his having written when he did that Neal deserves some consideration as a forerunner of the ‘American Vasari.’” Though he has received this recognition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Neal’s impact was already being overlooked as early as 1834 in William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, which makes no mention of Neal or the direct predecessor to Dunlap’s work, Neal’s 1829 essay “Landscape and Portrait-Painting” in The Yankee.
  Toward the middle of the century, after he had accumulated sufficient wealth and influence in his hometown of Portland, Maine, Neal turned more of his attention toward patronizing and uplifting artists in his immediate area, including Charles Codman and Benjamin Paul Akers. Neal met Akers when he was asked by a common acquaintance to assess Akers's early works of clay sculpture. Seeing promise, Neal offered him studio space above his office and commissioned his first bust. Neal’s encouragement, patronage, and connections helped Akers to become steadily employed with bust commissions. Neal claims a similar place in the life of Codman, who received his first informed criticism from Neal. The two first met when Codman was a sign-maker. Neal offered guidance and contacts sufficient for Codman to graduate from a struggling trades painter seeking odd jobs to an established, patronized fine art landscape painter. Neal also helped guide the work and careers of Franklin Simmons, John Rollin Tilton, and Harrison Bird Brown. Bird became Portland's most successful artist of the nineteenth century.
  Taste and approach
  John Neal’s earliest approach to critiquing art in the early 1820s was largely based on intuition, though he also was influenced by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Course of Lectures in Dramatic Art and Literature, first published in English in the US in 1815. Revealing his lack of training, Neal in the 1860s remembered his work in the 1820s: “I had been scribbling in the papers about Rembrandt Peale’s gallery, and criticizing some of the pictures, from sheer instinct and without any knowledge of painting.” His confidence in this approach is evident in his use of the novel Randolph to explore art viewers’ abilities to arrive at critical judgements without the ability to explain those judgements. This earliest example of Neal’s art criticism also shows Neal’s disdain for connoisseurship, which he sees as intertwined with an aristocratic way of life incompatible with American democratic ideals.
  Neal’s residence in London (1824–1827) and trip to Paris (1827) considerably broadened his exposure to the works of masters and to theoretical bases for art criticism. Initially he shows the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, but his Blackwood’s articles (1824–1825) showed him breaking with those tenets by favoring landscapes over history painting and focusing more on trades painting. Reynolds’s approach would remain dominant in England and the US until John Ruskin’s Modern Painters in 1843, though Neal’s 1829  “Landscape and Portrait-Painting” article in The Yankee anticipa
caption: John Neal in 1823 by Sarah Miriam Peale
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