Yankee Homespun, British Silk

An art museum last week issued a shrewdly challenging invitation to the public: "It has always been taken for granted that the English were the great masters, and the Americans just copied them. Go to the Museum and see if this is true." The art museum was the Rhode Island School of Design's in Providence. On its walls were hung 102 carefully chosen British and American paintings of the 1670-to-1825 period. The provocative question they raised: did colonial New England have a genuine native art, or did early American painters merely turn out second-rate English imitations?

The British and American paintings, hung side by side, made a striking contrast. British portraiture, leaning heavily on plumes, misty laces and shimmering silks, set out to romanticize the subject and present him in a softly flattering light as a person of distinction. The American who sat for his portrait often got a blunt, matter-of-fact estimate of his character from a social equal.

Primitives & Preferences. Among the English paintings in the Providence show were familiar Raeburn, Romney, Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits in the grand manner. Also on view were works by a famed trio of 18th Century New Englanders: John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull -- all of whom were influenced by English styles. But the surprise of the show was a group of little-known early American portraits, sound and penetrating studies by men who followed no tradition, who painted people as they saw them.

Some of these artists were the "primitives" of their day. Several worked so obscurely that their names have been lost. Their work was as straightforward and honest as their subjects' faces.

One such artist was known simply as McKay; he was a late-18th-Century itinerant painter whose Mrs. John Bush (see cut) was a clean, crackling portrait presenting the sitter with all the harsh candor of a snapshot. Another was Joseph Badger, Boston's outstanding portraitist from 1748 to 1758 (Copley superseded him). Badger's Mrs. John Edwards (see cut) made no attempt to impress anyone with the subject's elegance. Neither did Henry Gibbs (see cut), probably the work of one of the itinerant artists who traveled the countryside, sometimes carrying portraits prepainted except for faces.

In a scholarly catalogue to go with his show, Director Gordon Washburn caused a few lifted eyebrows by flatly asserting his own preference for the independent U.S. artists of the past. He also pooh-poohed tradition by insisting that the best of Copley, Stuart and Trumbull was their early work -- before British influence affected them.

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