The Figure
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Early American artists struggled to master the figure, as is evident from the naive likenesses of early settlers painted by self-taught itinerant "limners". By the late eighteenth century, however, artists such as Gilbert Stuart and Charles Willson Peale portrayed their aristocratic colonial contemporaries with great realism and refinement, in part derived from European precedents.
Figure painting can register a likeness, but it can also serve as a vehicle for conveying narrative and expressing emotion. During the late eighteenth century, dramatic action scenes with multiple figures became increasingly popular. Creation of these large canvases, such as John Singleton Copley's Red Cross Knight, involved weaving figures into complex compositions. The artist used his children as models for the knight and the allegorical figures of Faith and Hope in this scene from Edmund Spenser's epic poem, Faerie Queene. Genre scenes displayed a comparable diversity of figure types and actions, although without the grand settings and heroic touch often present in literary subjects. Instead, depictions of episodes from everyday life often contained a hint of sentimentality.
In early-nineteenth-century portraiture, especially of women, the figure becomes elongated and idealized to conform to the prevailing standards of elegance and beauty. In Thomas Sully's portrait of Eliza Ridgely, the artist dramatically lengthened her legs to almost impossible proportions. The work becomes an allegory of feminine refinement instead of a realistic rendering of the subject. In this way, artists enjoyed a degree of poetic license, as allegorical figures could represent conceptual ideas rather than actual individuals.
In contrast, painters such as George Catlin fulfilled a documentary function. His images of American Indians were intended to record physical appearance, dress, and customs. Winslow Homer approached the figure with a similar reportorial attitude as a Civil War correspondent, and later transformed his illustrative realism in works that illuminated relationships between man and nature. Another realist, Thomas Eakins, was an expert in anatomy who emphasized study from the nude figure even though Victorian America frowned upon it. Eakins became adept in portraying figures engaged in vigorous athletic activity as well as in moments of introspection.
With impressionism and symbolism, the figure became less a representational vehicle and more an aesthetic device by which artists demonstrated the virtuosity of their paint handling and evoked mood. In his portraits, Frank Weston Benson's loose brushwork captures both the figure of his model and the light and warmth of the summer day. Similarly, early modern artists transfigured the human body in various experiments with form and style. Art deco artists stretched the figure into lithe and graceful poses. Lyonel Feininger conceived the figure as an assembly of geometric forms moving through space.
Still, a current of realist figuration survived. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Ashcan school retained the loose brushwork of impressionism but rejected the comfortable themes of bourgeois leisure. Instead, these artists favored urban subjects, commenting on the social ills endured by the disenfranchised. Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton celebrated American types, sometimes with an exuberance that verged on caricature.
After World War II, the abstract expressionist movement dominated the art world. This highly gestural, nonrepresentational style rarely contained explicit figures, other than in the work of Willem de Kooning. However, in the 1960s pop artists returned to the figure wholeheartedly with images derived from popular culture and sculptural tableaux. In recent years the figure has again taken on a range of politically charged meanings and is frequently associated with issues of gender and identity.
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