Timeline of Art History

Late Eighteenth-Century American Drawings

American draftsmanship before 1800 was dominated by portraiture.
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Mrs. Pierre Bacot (Marianne Fleur Du Gue), Henrietta Johnston  American, Pastel and red and black chalk on toned laid paper., American
Henrietta Johnston
ca. 1708–10
Fraktur, Johann Heinrich Otto  American, Watercolor, pen and iron gall ink, and graphite on off-white laid paper, American
Johann Heinrich Otto
ca. 1770–1800
Hugh Mercer, Jr. (Study for "The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, Janury 3, 1777"), John Trumbull  American, Graphite on off-white laid paper, American
John Trumbull
1791
Pierre Bacot, Henrietta Johnston  American, Pastel and red chalk on off-white laid paper, American
Henrietta Johnston
ca. 1708–10
Maternity, Benjamin West  American, Red chalk on thin off-white laid paper, mounted on off-white laid paper, American
Benjamin West
1784
Mrs. Edward Green (Mary Storer), John Singleton Copley  American, Pastel on laid paper, mounted on canvas, American
John Singleton Copley
1765
Albert Gallatin, James Sharples  British, Pastel on light gray wove paper, American
James Sharples
ca. 1796
Collect Pond, New York City, Archibald Robertson  American, Scottish, Watercolor and black chalk on off-white laid paper, American
Archibald Robertson
Alexander Robertson
1798
Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, James Sharples  British, Pastel and black chalk (or black pastel) on toned (now oxidized) wove paper, American
James Sharples
1798
Daniel Strobel, Jr., John Vanderlyn  American, Probably Conté crayon, black chalk, and white gouache on off-white wove paper, American
John Vanderlyn
ca. 1799
Mrs. Daniel Strobel, Jr. (Anna Church Strobel) and Her Son, George, John Vanderlyn  American, Probably Conté crayon on off-white wove paper, American
John Vanderlyn
ca. 1799
Study for "The Siege of Gibraltar": Three Figures, John Singleton Copley  American, Black and red chalk on blue laid paper, American
John Singleton Copley
1785–86
Dyer Sharp Wynkoop, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin  French, Conté rayon, charcoal (?), and white chalk heightening on off-white laid paper coated with gouache, American
Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin
1800
Osage Warrior, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin  French, Watercolor and graphite on off-white wove paper, American
Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin
1805–7

As it was in painting, American draftsmanship before 1800 was dominated by portraiture. Among the earliest examples of the genre were in the medium of pastel, imported into the American colonies as far back as the first decade of the 1700s and best exemplified by the extensive production of one of this country’s first notable female artists, Henrietta Johnston (ca. 1674–1729). A descendant of French Huguenots who lived successively in England and Ireland, Johnston emigrated to Charlestown, South Carolina, where she continued the pastel practice begun in Dublin after the death of her first husband. Her small, delicately limned and tinted oval portraits were highly prized by her new neighbors (; ) and anticipated the blossoming of pastel portraiture in the painstaking and perceptive hand of John Singleton Copley in Boston as early as 1758. Despite having never traveled to Europe before the American Revolution, Copley was aware of the uncanny refinement of pastel portraiture by the Swiss artist Jean Étienne Liotard (), with whom he corresponded as early as 1762, and produced bust-length likenesses of affluent New England sitters striking for both the representation of their fashions and the revelation of their character. Copley’s pastels remained in such high regard that his portrait of Mrs. Edward Green () was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum before any of the oil portraits for which he is generally known.

Profile portraits may have been the preeminent representatives of portrait draftsmanship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their widespread popularity was created and nurtured by the ethos of practical invention, psychological and anatomical theory, classical study, and republican politics that characterized the Enlightenment in Europe and America. They were also much cheaper than painted portraits. Produced with a drawing machine known as the physiognotrace, profile portraits such as those by the French émigré Charles Balthazar J. F. de Saint-Mémin (1770–1852) and the English-born James Sharples (ca. 1751–1811) and his family offered pre-photographic accuracy, the evocation of classical virtue, and affordability to citizens of a new nation not strongly sympathetic at first to matters of artistic style and aristocratic pretense (; ; ; ). Not dissimilar to the iconic objectivity of profile portraits are the austere, black Conté and chalk drawings that John Vanderlyn (1775–1852) fashioned for several Americans living in France during the Napoleonic period (; ) following his studies with the Neoclassical painter François André Vincent in Paris.

Thanks to expatriate Americans such as Copley and Benjamin West (1738–1820), narrative painting in both Neoclassical and proto-Romantic styles was pioneered in London in the late eighteenth century. For such works, expert preparatory draftsmanship was indispensable to portraying historical personages, articulating the figure in action, and to pictorial composition. Serving the first and second purposes is the pencil portrait by John Trumbull (1756–1843), West’s pupil, of Hugh Mercer, Jr. (), son of the hero of the Battle of Princeton in 1777, which Trumbull made for incorporation into his painting of the event (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven). For the monumental tableaus of British military victories that Copley began producing after emigrating to England in 1775, he made hundreds of dynamic figure studies such as those of fleeing and dying Spanish sailors () for his Siege of Gibraltar (1783–91; Guildhall Art Gallery, London). After West became court painter to the fanatically religious King George III, he executed many images of biblical and moral subjects: his superb allegorical chalk drawing Maternity (or Caritas; ), undoubtedly inspired by Renaissance masters such as Correggio whom West so esteemed, may have been made for reproduction in engraving.

If portraiture and figure painting are the most conspicuous surviving eighteenth-century forms of draftsmanship by Americans, in the countryside decorative drawing in ink and watercolor, usually derived from medieval traditions of manuscript illumination, was practiced, frequently by unknown artists but occasionally by identifiable figures. One such artist was Johann Heinrich Otto (ca. 1733–ca. 1800), author of the fanciful Fraktur Motifs (), with its colorful arabesques of crowns, flowers, parrots, and peacocks. Landscape painting, virtually unknown in America before 1800, found its chief expression in picturesque and topographical watercolors, often produced for engraved reproduction. Perhaps the most prominent practitioners in New York City were the Scottish émigré brothers Alexander (1772–1841) and Archibald (1765–1835) Robertson, who founded the city’s first known art school, the Columbia Academy. Their schematic style of representation, exemplified in Collect Pond, New York City, executed in 1798 (), is such a typical product of picturesque and pedagogical conventions of the time that it can be attributed only provisionally to one of the brothers, in this case Archibald.


Contributors

Kevin J. Avery
The American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003


Further Reading

Avery, Kevin J., et al. American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, Artists Born before 1835. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. See on MetPublications

Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr. American Master Drawings and Watercolors: A History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.


Citation

View Citations

Avery, Kevin J. “Late Eighteenth-Century American Drawings.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/amdr/hd_amdr.htm (October 2003)