Art in Colonial America

In general, colonial Americans had little interest in artistic activities that did not serve some useful purpose. But while this attitude ruled out certain forms of artistic creativity, it also had positive advantages. It encouraged honest craftsmanship and tended to eliminate meretricious ornamentation and display. The best colonial art displayed technical skill, strength and simplicity of design, and natural good taste.

Art in Colonial America

Colonial American Painting

John White (1540 – 1606) was the first painter to visit British America. He made important watercolor records of Native American life on the Eastern seaboard. The white artists first visited America were mainly map-maker and sketched landscapes for an expedition of exploration, and mostly officers in army or navy.

Roanoke Indians, watercolor, 1585, John White, Now in British Museum

A number of portraits have survived from 17th century New England and New York, none of which display much technical skill or aesthetic sensitivity. Most of them were the work of “limners” whose main occupation was the painting of signs to hang outside shops or taverns.

Somewhat greater competence was shown by a few New Yorkers of Dutch origin, who had been influenced by the artistic tradition of Holland. Unfortunately we do not know the names of those qualified artists.

Sir William Paston, ca. 1643–44, oil on canvas by unknown Dutch artist.
Now in Felbrigg Hall, The Windham Collection (National Trust).

In the early 18th century, English portrait painters began to discover that there was a market for their services in the colonies. While they generally displayed a tendency to sentimentalize and prettify their sitters, they also introduced knowledge of professional techniques into America.

John Smibert settled in New England in 1729. His portraits of Boston merchants and clergymen served as models for native craftsmen. Some of his disciples were able to combine his technical accomplishment with an uncompromising realism and a respect for individuality that were products of their American background.

The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage) by John Smibert, 1728-1739. Now at Yale University Art Gallery

Among a number of New England painters, two did work of outstanding value. They were Robert Feke of Newport, who was active during the 1730’s and 1740’s and John Singleton Copley.

Copley painted his first picture in 1753, when he was fifteen. He was busy for the next twenty years portraying Boston merchants and their families. In 1774 he left for England in search of wider opportunities. He own fame and money in London, but the equality of his work deteriorated. He is remembered today for the strength and honesty of his early portraits.

Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley, 1778.

Outside New England, Philadelphia was the only area where native work was encouraged. The first talented figure in this region was Benjamin West. But West went to Europe in 1760, and like Copley later, gained material success while losing his artistic integrity.

In the opinion of modern critics the best of the Philadelphia artists was Charles Wilson Peale, who was active through Revolutionary period. He is chiefly remembered for his portraits of George Washington. Peale’s work combined a realism like that of the New Englanders with a warmth and gaiety which may have been deprived from his Maryland upbringing.

Nancy Hallam as Fidele in Shakespeare's Cymbeline by Charles Willson Peale, 1771.

Born in Switzerland to an artist family, Jeremiah Theus came to America in the 1730s. He settled in Charleston to paint portraits of some of South Carolina’s wealthiest citizens. A talented portraitist in the next generation, Henry Benbridge, offered miniature versions of his work in watercolor on ivory. Virginian Thomas Jefferson was painted numerous times by Connecticut native John Trumbull.

Thus, throughout the colonial period portraiture remained the most popular type of painting. Especially, the southern elite liked to hang them in the first-floor parlors and second-floor ballrooms of grand mansions.

Art in Colonial America

American Colonial Sculpture and Other Art Forms

Apart from painting artistic qualities were displayed especially in the construction of furniture and utensils. Copying and modifying the work of Englishmen like Chippendale and Shreaton, carpenters in Pennsylvania and New England made superbly designed chairs and cabinets.

British colonists of all ranks were experiencing a consumer revolution, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. More substantial houses based on English Georgian architecture rose in the landscape for the gentry. There arrived exotic beverages such as coffee, tea, and chocolate in seventeenth-century Europe and soon became available in the colonies. The tea required entirely new panoply of goods for its preparation, service, and consumption:-

• the teapot
• the sugar bowl
• imported cups and saucers

Even a new form of furniture, the tea table also introduced. Colonial craftsmen soon started making them.

Tea Pot (1745-55) made by famous silversmith Josiah Austin.

A Round Tea Table from Colonial American Period, 1765.

Sprawling plantation homes in the South were filled with both and imported and American-made furniture, decorative arts, and paintings. Charleston, South Carolina, developed as the most wealthy and largest city in the South and the leading port and trading center for the southern colonies. By this time, the population in the Carolinas had grown to a number of 100,000.

Seeking religious freedom, Many French Protestant Huguenots settled in Charleston. They built splendid townhouses along the harbor’s edge. Sculptures and other materials were needed to decorate them. Most elite American families in the South owned fine English earthenware and Chinese porcelains. European craftsmen decorated some of these imports with the American market in mind.

Soon, the imports from Europe were reversed as Boston grew significantly in population and economic strength. One-third of all British vessels were made in New England by the 1750s. Not only that, American artistic products found their valuable consumer even in Africa, Asia, the West Indies, South America and other parts of Europe.

The furniture industry was gradually developing from the beginning of the 18 century with new order of skilled artisans and organization. Fine furniture making was recognized a highly respected craft. The cabinetmakers were encouraged to construct elaborate pieces. Because demand increased for larger and more important pieces to display newly acquired wealth. John Townsend of Newport, Rhode Island was one of the most talented native-born cabinetmakers.

Philadelphia had supplanted Boston as the largest and richest of colonial American cities by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Cabinetmakers of Philadelphia created masterpieces in the Rococo style based on images in ornament and print books imported from London. Philadelphia attracted many ambitious and talented London-trained craftsmen, where they fulfilled the demand for high-style furniture with locally made versions of English styles. Traditional German design motifs, however, still circulated in the Pennsylvania countryside.

German artisans produced decorated pottery and glassware. In Boston, silversmith like Jeremiah Dummer and the famous Paul Revere excelled in the making of tankards and other household articles. There was also a flourishing market for carvers in stone, metal and wood. These could decorate fireplaces, tombstones, weather vanes and the prows of merchant ships.

Art in Colonial America

Music in Colonial America

In music the record was much less impressive in colonial America. Colonial Americans liked to sing, and many of them learned to play an instrument. But there was virtually no original work. The favorite musical instruments were fiddles and fifes. The early settlers brought English folk songs and dances. These continued to provide popular entertainment in all parts of the colonies, including Puritan New England.

Bass violin (1640–65) by unknown maker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

American dancing seems to have become more boisterous than that of England, while American singers were more inclined towards a melancholy tone. But throughout the colonial period there was no addition to the repertory. The first American folk song, Springfield Mountain, was certainly not earlier than the American Revolution, and may belong to the early 19th century.

Listen Springfield Mountain

Another form of popular music, the singing of hymns, did not begin until the 18th century. New Light groups after the Great Awakening liked to express their religious fervor by singing hymns composed by Englishmen like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. Some of these groups, particularly among the Baptist congregations along the frontier, gradually evolved composition of their own. In the 19th century these spread to the slave population in the South and resulted in the Negro spiritual awakening.

Meanwhile, the more orthodox New England congregations gradually became willing to accept instrumental music and hymns in the church service. During the later years of the 18th century William Billings of Boston composed about three hundred hymn tunes and did much to improve the standards of congregational singing.

An Early Colonial Hymn of William Billings

Music of higher quality won appreciative audiences among the upper classes, especially in South Carolina and other Southern colonies. Concerts and performances of ballad operas were frequent and well attended. But much of the finest colonial music came from the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly from the Moravians who settled at Bethlehem, bringing with them Bach’s works. The Dunker community at Ephrata also delivered great musical performances.

The first native music composer was the Philadelphian Francis Hopkinson. He wrote music for the song My Days Have been So Wondrous Free in 1759 and afterwards composed opera. With typical 18th century versatility, Hopkinson also wrote poems, painted pictures, served in the Continental Congress, designed the American flag and eventually became a judge. But no American composer of serious music achieved high rank until the 20th century.

Art in Colonial America

American Colonial Architecture

Most of the colonial buildings in the U.S.A. were of Georgian style. Buildings outside the Thirteen Colony areas reflected the architectural traditions of the colonial powers that controlled these regions. During the 17th century most building were small, crudely constructed and lacking decoration. The initial tendency of each group of settlers was to reproduce the kind of architecture they had been accustomed to at home, although with much less elaboration.

Thus early Boston recalled Elizabethan England, early New York look like a city in Holland and sections of Pennsylvania resembled the Rhineland. The first houses often had features which had been appropriate to life in a crowded medieval city but were no longer functioned in America.

Colonial carpenters gradually learned to adapt their techniques to the new environment. American dwelling houses, while remaining simple began to acquire more pleasing lines and proportions.

Colonial Georgian Design

In the 18th century Southern planters and Northern merchants were able to spend money on palatial private houses. There was also growing demand for more elaborate churches and government buildings. People turned for guidance to books of architectural designs which had been published in England. These designs were copied, with modifications by American builders. There were no professional architects in the colonies.

The result of this fusion of English forms with American craftsmanship was the colonial Georgian style. The style prevailed throughout the thirteen colonies, with some regional variations. The great age of colonial building was from 1740 until the American Revolution. A Georgian colonial house usually has a formally defined living room and dining room. A number of houses sometimes include a family room too.

Georgian was a development of the Renaissance style which had been introduced into England in the 17th century by Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. This style made a sharp break with the medieval Gothic tradition. The Wren Building at the College of William & Mary was designed by Christopher Wren.

The Wren Building at the College of William & Mary

Colonial Georgian is best exemplified in the red brick houses built by rich Virginia planters, in government buildings like Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg and in the white wooden churches erected throughout southern New England.

Colonial Georgian buildings were ideally built in brick, with wood trim, wooden columns and painted white, sometimes replaced with pale yellow. The reign of King George II witnessed growing popularity for this design.

Other Architectural Designs

The architectural style evolved in Louisiana is known as French colonial. The style developed in Spanish colonies of North America is identified as Spanish colonial design. The style evokes Renaissance and Baroque styles of Spain and Mexico. The United States has such buildings mainly in Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California.

There also developed German colonial design and Dutch colonial in their respective areas apart from Mid-Atlantic colonial design in the region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay.

Simple, harmonious and dignified colonial buildings reflected the good taste and the optimistic self-assurance of the 18th century mind. It would be easy to argue that later American architects have never surpassed these achievements of the colonial craftsmen.

Art in Colonial America

Conclusion

Not only the social conditions under which Americans lived but their religious beliefs were responsible for the American attitude towards art. In earlier societies the primary function of art was mainly to assist in religious interests and advancements. Most forms of Protestantism, however, insisted that this was unnecessary. They believed that the soul could communicate with God directly, and sensuous intermediaries were positively harmful. The Puritans regarded religious pictures and statues as idolatrous and preferred to worship in plain meeting-houses, in which they sang the psalms without instrumental accompaniment.

The higher form of art thus lost what had formerly been their main social justification. The Puritans were not hostile to the fine arts. But they considered them only agreeable recreations, having divorced them from religion. On the other hand, the seriousness and the honesty of the Puritan mind contributed largely to the high quality of the useful arts in colonial America.

A Bureau Table made by John Townsend

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Art in Colonial America Sources:

1. Larkin O.W. (1949), Art and Life in America.
2. Savelle M. (1948), Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind.
3. Bushman, R.L. (1992), The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities.
4. Parrington, V.L. (1927), Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. I.
5. Lovell, M.M. (2004), Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America.
6. Rossiter C. (1953), Seedtime of Republic.
Title Painting:- Monkeys and Parrots by unknown Dutch artist, 1660s, oil on canvas. It is in the Collection of Glen Dooley, New York.