Three Yankee Expatriates

By ROBERT HUGHES

Benjamin Blyth Limner BEGS to inform the Public that he has opened a House near the City Coffee-House, for the performance of Limning in Oil, Crayons and miniature.

Numbing provinciality was the lot of artists in America 200 years ago. Limning, as painting was called, was a trade, like ropemaking or wheelwrighting. To most of the itinerant "house, sign and fancy" painters, it gave a meager living. They shifted from town to town in New England, setting down in wiry outline and crude, flat tones the tight lips and beaky noses of parsons, housewives and merchants. There were no art schools, let alone an academy, and the demand for big canvases of history and myth--which, across the Atlantic, gave art its public necessity--was nil. Europe was very far away.

America's sense of isolation and distance, and the effort needed to overcome it, is the theme of two delightful shows that opened last week at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. One, "Paintings by New England Provincial Artists, 1775-1800," organized by Art Historian Nina Fletcher Little, illustrates the limner tradition with 76 paintings by 34 artists, backed up with domestic objects of the sort that appears in those stiff, poignant effigies--chairs, painted floorcloths, a child's coral-garnished silver whistle. The other show, "Copley, Stuart, West," deals with the first three American-born painters to escape from this matrix and enter the European arena in order to become, in the full sense of the word, professional artists.

Making It. Benjamin West (1738-1820) was the first to go. He went to Italy and then to London, where he became court painter to George III. That a colonial could bring off such a feat was regarded as singular. It turned him into a precocious father figure for later Yankee expatriates, notably Copley and Stuart. Here was their lesson in making it: the teen-age limner who, thanks to Rome and practical ambition, rose to become the second president of the Royal Academy. In fact, West was by temperament an ideal official artist: studious, methodical, competent, a bovine draftsman. But his neoclassical work, done under the first impact of Naples and Rome, is another matter: the small sketch for West's first classical subject, The Landing of Agrippina at Brundisium (1766), is a grave and stony image. West's intense curiosity about classical prototypes leaves no doubt as to the impact of Europe on his receptive mind.

There were, of course, problems of assimilation. When John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) went to Italy, he also struggled to resolve them in his first European picture, an Ascension (1775), which must be one of the quaintest homages to Raphael ever made. But in the same year he met two wealthy American tourists and painted their portrait. Mr.

and Mrs. Ralph Izard was, by prevailing American standards, a work of sophistication. The image of the South Carolinian discoursing to his wife upon the meaning of a drawing from the antique is almost poignant; there cannot have been too many couples like them back home. Copley was a brilliant recorder of the human face, the female face especially. The portraits of the middle-aged women he painted in the 1760s are so dense and assured, warts and all, that one may well prefer them to the more florid exercises in the manner of Gainsborough that Copley resorted to when, in London, he wanted to rival West.

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), the youngest of the trio by 17 years, remains best known as George Washington's portraitist. He turned out 111 Washingtons--one of which, Washington standing in the battle smoke of Dorchester Heights beside the improbable pewter-colored buttocks of his horse, is in the present show. But when not involved in these feats of iconic mass production, Stuart was in some ways the most advanced of the three, with his high color--the faces are almost rose-pink--and vivid atmospherics. He saw in patches, rather than lines, and this almost impressionist knitting of tonal areas under complicated layers of glaze, impasto and more glaze could, in works like his portrait of General Henry Knox, circa 1805, produce astonishingly subtle and robust effects. This shift in style pointed to the poetic future of 19th century art--and to the maturity of Amerian painting.

Robert Hughes

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