The Tasteful and the Enlightened in Early America

If "Aesthetics" and "Enlightenment" are modern terms that early modern intellectuals would not have recognized, they are also considerably general ones that tend to obscure the diversity of their origins and particularity of their evolutions. Each implies the progress of society, the possibility of human perfection, and the pursuit of the beautiful, the good, and the true for all. But their histories have often been told as orderly, unitary, and above all, elite: limited to a relatively small number of thinkers, writers, readers, and concerns. This is especially true in the American context, where such ideas have long been thought to have arrived only fitfully and then been realized only belatedly. Although historians no longer assume that the priorities of religion and commerce quelled the desire for truth and beauty in the eighteenth-century British colonies and early nation, the scope of inquiry has too often been limited to a rather narrowly canonical set of authors and questions. Recently, two important monographs have taken very different approaches to the history of art and ideas in early America.

Catherine E. Kelly's Republic of Taste explores the vernacular cultures of taste in the early United States. For the past two decades, literary scholars have recovered the history of aesthetics, focusing in particular on philosophical ideas and political controversies. As a faculty of the mind, these studies concluded, taste was understood to give pleasure, symbolize virtue, and confer distinction; but it was also a means for educated people to comprehend and sustain the political advantages of shared community. Kelly extends this work by turning her attention to a broader set of concerns, practices, and practitioners. In doing so, her original, erudite, lucidly written book discovers an idea of taste that is emphatically more visual, more material, more market-driven, more manifestly gendered, and more socially affirming and nationalistic.

Republic of Taste begins by showing how boys' and girls' academies were both key elements of the "republican project" and key conduits for the lessons of taste. Long popular sources of education for the children of colonial elites, academies rose in number and prominence after the Revolution and became highly visible civic institutions. Academies aimed to prepare their students for social, moral, and commercial success through teaching, among other subjects, the rules and techniques of taste. They taught students to recognize the beauties of literature and to describe those of nature and art in poetry and prose. They also taught handwriting, dancing, genteel comportment, and politeness—the skills of social performance necessary to the happy and virtuous life. Academies also offered instruction in the fine arts, especially drawing and painting. Emphasizing the emulation of classical models, they aimed at both developing artistic skills and internalizing good taste. But the gendered division of aesthetic education was clear. Whereas girls (who also studied needlework and other decorative arts) typically displayed their artistic productions as aesthetic commodities and chose narrative, often iconic themes, boys' work was rarely displayed and more often limited to the cultivation of abstract technique and universal truths.

Such training was provided by a growing array of teaching artists whose own routes to success were no less provisional. Reading the letters, journals, and memoirs of such early nineteenth-century painters as Mary Way, Ethan Allen Greenwood, William Dunlap, and Susanna Paine, Kelly reveals that being an artist in the New Republic involved numerous economic, social, and gendered challenges. Although instruction in taste was in high demand, few parents considered art a respectable profession for their children, and training beyond the academies was hard to come by. Artists thrived by emphasizing their taste, which they cultivated through reading criticism, visiting museums and exhibitions, and travel, all of which emphasized "habits of looking" (p. 68). But they also aggressively cultivated reputations, connections, and patrons. In a...