Art: PIONEER PAINTERS

AMERICANS’ regard for their pioneers, which comes to bloom around the Fourth of July, feeds largely on word and spirit. But to reinforce facts in print and feelings in the heart, there is testimony by eyewitnesses−the painters who were there. Some of their best evidence is presented on the following pages.

Because they made no distinction between art and craft, the early pioneer American painters did not lack craftsmanship; each of their canvases was at least as well painted as the wall on which it hung. But by European standards, early colonial art was medieval. Being mostly commoners cut off from London court life, the Puritans had remained unaware of Renaissance art. Instead of trying to paint people in the round, they produced flat, stylized maps of their sitters. The word for this, derived from medieval illuminating of manuscripts, was “limning.” It permitted likenesses of a limited sort, but lifelikeness was beyond it.

Margaret Gibbs is a classic example of the Puritan limner’s art. Typically, seven-year-old Margaret meets the eye not like a real girl in a real world but like a dream of one. Her body looks no thicker than a dress on a clothes hanger. The ringleted hair, silver necklace, lace, drawstrings and bows are presented distinctly. But it would be hard to guess how Margaret looked from the side. Her square-toed shoes scarcely touch the floor, and though the floor is seen from above, Margaret stands at eye level. Nevertheless, the portrait is superb as well as typical limning. Margaret neither looms out of the picture nor shrinks into it, but stands quiet and assured, with soft gestures and thinking eyes.

Captain Thomas Smith is an amazing canvas, for its time and place. Done within a few years of the Gibbs picture, it made the leap from medieval toward renaissance portraiture. The captain, who painted it himself, thought in terms of shapes not pattern, action not stillness, and character not spirit. Almost nothing is known about Smith, but his picture presents much more evidence than historians generally allow. The canvas makes plain that he had sailed the sea, that he had seen European pictures, and that he was a stern man, thoughtful of death. The poem under the pictured skull reads, in part:

Why why should I the World be minding

therein a World of Evils Finding Then Farwell World: Farwell thy Janes

thy Joies thy Toies thy Wiles thy Warrs

Ann Pollard stands outside art history. The anonymous artist plainly forgot himself and what little he may have known of artistic conventions the moment Dame Pollard’s basilisk stare fell upon him. He painted her neither as a tender dream, like Margaret Gibbs, nor as a fleshly reality, like Thomas Smith, but as an apparition. Shrewd as J. P. Morgan, straight as Queen Victoria, she rises out of the night, holding her book like a scepter. The ancient well merited her haunting memorial. One of Boston’s original settlers, she bore twelve children, kept a tavern and lived to be 105, surviving all of her generation.

Joseph Wanton is character analysis in the grand manner. Done by Scottish Immigrant John Smibert, it shows a Royalist politician whose bland, irresolute features bode ill for his future fame. After Wanton became Governor of Rhode Island, he fought with soft talk the stirrings of the American Revolution, and retired the moment the storm broke. Painter Smibert’s story was just the opposite. He learned his craft by studying the masters while painting carriages, came to America in 1729, when he was 40. One year later he held the first art show ever recorded in America, and became the toast of Boston.

The Reverend Thomas Hiscox was painted by a New World follower of Smibert, named Robert Feke. A devout Baptist, Feke portrayed the Baptist minister with the utmost simplicity and force. Hiscox stands above the viewer, as in a pulpit. Though the minister’s hair has a certain flowing grace, the rest of him does not. He looks like a bullfrog. The powerful throat seems to be preparing its organ tones; the wide, traplike mouth is about to open. Meanwhile, the brilliantly modeled eyes focus with disdain upon someone in the back row−whether a sinner or a sneezer. The portrait achieves a quality rare in most places and times, and almost unheard of in its own: immediacy.

Charles Calvert of Maryland, by John Hesselius, is one of the finest surviving examples of early Southern portraiture. The five-year-old subject, a great-great-great-grandson of Maryland’s founder, stands like a general in full regalia ordering his troops to advance. But Calvert has the dreamy look of a little boy who wonders how soon he can goout to play. His personal slave seems the better actor.

Sea Captains Carousing at Surinam lies a world away from such formal make-believe. Painter John Greenwood, a footloose Boston artist, showed the soft underbelly of Puritanism. Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, was a stopping place on the Yankee merchant circuit. Greenwood spent some years there, put himself in his picture rushing, candle in hand, for the door. Among the other identified portraits is that of Captain Nicholas Cooke (later Governor of Rhode Island), smoking a pipe and talking with Captain Esek Hopkins (later commander of the Continental navy) at the table. Another Hopkins, Stephen (who was to sign the Declaration of Independence), blesses an oblivious salt with rum, while Captain Ambrose Page neatly vomits in his pocket. The time is 2 a.m. and things (including Page’s coattails) are warming up.

In the case of Greenwood’s picture, documentary value far outweighs esthetic merit. In others, such as Feke’s portrait of Clergyman Hiscox, the balance is kept even. But whether viewed primarily as art or as history, the colonial canvases make an eye-opening display.