Portraiture
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The portraits of the next generation of American artists were similar in purpose, but technically more accomplished. Study abroad was often part of these artists' training. Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley were among those who traveled to Europe to study the work of the great masters and take instruction with eminent academicians. Stuart excelled at capturing the personality and psychological presence of his sitters. The theatrical British Grand Manner portrait style was adopted by Copley and then popularized in America through work of Stuart and John Trumbull.
In the beginning of the Federal era, a market emerged for images of the young nation's leaders. Gilbert Stuart painted more than one hundred portraits of George Washington. American heroes were rarely portrayed with the pomp that surrounded European aristocracy. In keeping with the colonial values of self-determination, portraits instead referred to individual accomplishments or suggested the sitter's symbolic importance to the nation. Rembrandt Peale's portrait of his brother documents Rubens' success with what was reputed to be the first geranium grown in America. The flowers were prized in Europe but difficult to cultivate in the United States. In this light, the work becomes not only an image of the artist's brother, but a portrait of American self-sufficiency and achievement.
Portraiture served a documentary purpose for early Americans that is fulfilled by the camera today. Miniatures, usually only a few inches high, were often the only visual record of loved ones separated by great distances. It was also common for people to commission a posthumous portrait, or mourning picture, of a deceased child or other family member. Photography became more accessible during the mid-nineteenth century, leading to a decrease in the demand for painted portraits. Nevertheless, affluent sitters still took pleasure in proclaiming their material comforts with oil and canvas. Thomas Sully's idealized, elegant images of Philadelphia society exemplify the romantic style that was popular well into the 1860s. Although now better known for his genre scenes, Eastman Johnson accepted several portrait commissions, including The Brown Family.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the art centers of Europe continued to attract American artists and wealthy patrons. Some American artists preferred to live abroad, where they had greater access to the great public art collections and to recent developments in contemporary art. Mary Cassatt spent much of her long career in France, combining her interest in portraiture with the new style of impressionism. John Singer Sargent became a very successful portraitist, both in Europe and America. His knack for capturing the quality of fleeting moments in time adds a layer of depth to what might otherwise be simply society portraits.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, realism was the dominant portrait style. Thomas Eakins was adept at conveying personality, portraying his subjects with unvarnished realism and penetrating psychological insight. In the 1876 portrait of his niece, Ella, Eakins lends an air of serious deliberation to a subject that is often overly sentimentalized. Best known for her portraits of children, Lydia Field Emmet incorporated characteristics of modernist techniques into her fundamentally traditional style. The resulting works are realistic portrayals that convey a sense of immediacy and the liveliness of her young subjects.
With the rise of abstraction in the twentieth century, experimentation with line, shape, and color changed artistic presentations of sitters. Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother shows the influence of abstract modernist trends from Europe, including cubism and expressionism. Walt Kuhn's Wisconsin, painted during the Depression, is a portrait of an era more than an individual. In order to increase the expressive impact of the work, Kuhn created a representative portrait that could be any one of a number of people at a particular place in time. Similarly, artists in the 1960s employed images of widely recognizable figures from popular culture as compositional and expressive devices, producing icons of mass culture in the guise of portraits. Andy Warhol's images of celebrities are the quintessential example of this approach.
Portraiture in the postmodern age continues to take on new form and purpose. Chuck Close's hugely magnified images experiment with both the meaning and the process of the portrait. From a distance, Fanny appears to be a photograph, but in fact this highly detailed image is composed entirely of the artist's fingerprints. Barkley Leonnard Hendricks, best known for his highly realistic portraits of African Americans, uses painting to address issues of culture and identity. A segment of the population traditionally underrepresented in fine art, these life-sized figures achieve iconic status through their neutral environments and their direct, serious gaze. Here, portraiture no longer solely fulfills a documentary function, but explores complex social and cultural issues.
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