Part I. THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PAINTING

After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18th century through the early 19th century) consists of history painting and portraits created since colonization.

George Washington (Lansdowne portrait) by Gilbert Stuart, 1796.

Most Americans have fixed their eyes so exclusively on European painting that they are unaware of their own; they do not realize that we are the inheritors of a tradition of which we may well be proud. Flourishing on these shores for almost three centuries, our painters have expressed with brilliance the life and the dreams of the thirteen Colonies and the expanding United States. They may face the future with confidence based on s trength.

Colonial Period and The Eighteenth-Nineteenth Century

William Vans Murray by Mather Brown, 1787.

Painting in American colonial period consisted mainly of portraits. John Smibert, America's first well-trained artist, landed at Newport in 1729. Robert Feke painted the beauty of the aristocratic yearnings of Colonial society. Benjamin West (1738 - 1820) was a Neoclassical painter; West painted scenes of American life. He had an important leadership and influence on later artists (he had a long list of American students that later became famous painters).

Charles Willson Peale was the patriarch of the The Peale Family, the First Family of American art; portrait painter, Charles Willson Peale exerted a major influence on American painting through his own work and that of his sons, brothers and nieces; Rembrandt Peale, his son, was also a remarkable painter; they contributed in a large way to the growth of American artistic interests and institutions.

Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials while John Singleton Copley painted emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class. John Trumbull is known as the artist who was making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe, 1770.	Edward Savage The Washington Family, ca. 1790.	The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, 1818.	Charles Willson Peale, Self Portrait, 1822.
Gilbert Stuart by John Neagle, 1825.	John Marshall by Henry Inman, 1832.