National traditions of art in the West have the same subject matters. There are landscapes and seascapes, portraits, battle scenes, disasters. apocalyptic and utopian imaginings. This differs from Chinese art, for example, which emphasizes landscapes and seascapes, and also from Arab art, which neglects the human figure. The Western national traditions are distinct, however, in that each has its own themes and its own artistic resources, and so a Dutch Golden Age portrait looks different from, let us say, a Nineteenth Century American portrait. A Vermeer would not be confused with an Eakins, and not just because of the way people are dressed or the settings in which they are placed. Vermeer gives his models a quiet grace that is emphasized by his subtle colors while Eakins makes his people impressive because of their carriage and the solemn colors in which they are painted.
It is possible to enumerate the characteristic themes and artistic conventions of every nation in the Western world. The Golden Age Dutch, for example, provide all of their subjects, whether maids or noblemen or merchants, whether peasants in a comic mode, with the dignity that befits them and in most cases does so by finding a focal point for the picture that makes its subjects neither in close up or at much remove, and so in the ensemble of men caught by Rembrandt in “Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild”, each of the forceful figures has his own presence as a person to be respected as well as reckoned with even while they are united in some common effort. That is different from what happens in Spanish portraiture where Valesquez famously provides multiple levels of attention in “Les Meninas” as the viewer sees each of the spectators to the painting on the easel as being a separate and whole composition on its own, even down to the dog in the foreground, this especially true of the child in the center who is in a world of her own, untouched by the others being portrayed. The same is true in Goya’s “Mariano Goya”, where the chubby young grandson of the artist is left hanging in air, tethered to earth by the cord to his toy carriage. That absence of placement is something a Netherlander would not do-- but from which, I would suggest, the very Spanish Picasso took much inspiration, in that he lets his Rose Period and Blue Period figures just hang there, with just a suggestion of context. And the French, for their part, are taken with providing order both metaphysical and social in their paintings, that very clear in Poussin, where the social classes are represented as above and beneath one another, duets and trios in “The Rape of the Sabine Women” balancing one another off, and even in Fraganaud, where the balance between men and women gravitating and hesitating before one another is matched by the balance of space, a woman in a swing looking across the canvas to her potential or real lover.
American painting can be characterized in terms that are reminiscent of the way its intellectual history is captured. Just as individualism marks Dutch painting and orderliness marks both French painting and French thinking-- at least until the reactionary thinking of the Third Republic set in, there is also both a theme and a technique that mark American painting. The open secret of American painting is that it is concerned with heroism as that is more than a catchphrase for anyone who can be a role model for others, but means instead what it originally meant, which was to risk great physical injury or death in the pursuit of some adventure, that meaning, in America, Lewis and Clark making it to the Pacific and back, or the adventure through Donner Pass, or, in real life, the bravery of George H. W. Bush in the Pacific during World War II. It can also mean the quieter heroism of an individual struggling to overcome adversity, as Lincoln and FDR and, or, by a stretch, opening up oneself to obloquy for taking an unfashionable path, as did Clarence Darrow and Hester Prynne. This is different from the courage of the saints, who are known for having cultivated or expressed internal virtues despite temptations, or the heroes of the spirit, like young Werther, who are driven by their demons rather than undertake to deal with unfavorable circumstances. Sir Gawain may not have understood the pickle he got himself into, but then he was on a quest which required him to be heroic so that he might be gallant, while Huck Finn knows he risks his life and his sense of himself on the river just so that he might be rid of his old man.
If heroism is the topic of so much of American art, the visual distinctiveness of American art is its devotion to depicting the enormity of spaces and how distance extends itself through space. This is certainly true of the Hudson River painters, as when Thomas Cole in “The Oxbow in the Connecticut River” made a bend in the river look like a geometrical figure carved by Providence into the landscape, a mere human observer looking upon this impossibility. It is also true of the expansive paintings of Alfred Bierstadt and of Frederic Church, the latter’s “The Heart of the Andes” depicting a painter at his easel who is so small that you might miss him as he is caught up in a landscape of ever more intricate tropical flowers and vines working themselves up to a mountain, as if the whole collection amounted to a piece of wall paper decoration when it is, in fact, real. Not just great expanses provide a sense of space. The portrayal of space by George Inness in “Old Elm at Metford” shows the slow inching up of a road to its modest crest as it enters a farmyard shows the inevitability of geometry, as that is presented clod of earth upon clod of earth, just as happens when we remember the incline of the road in the streets near our childhood homes. No one escapes from space. That is the American perception, as I think is indicated by the American Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock providing depth while Theodore Rothko supplies for the reality of the dimensions of a swatch of color and Elsworth Kelly provides spaces between his objects so that everything is even more geographically complicated.
All of this is very different from English painting, which certainly had broad vistas of land to contemplate, but which until Turner was preoccupied with charming pictures, such as Constable’s “The Hay Wain”, which balanced off the pieces of a scene so that the viewer can appreciate the arrangement of the objects rather than what they made you feel about space. The same is true even when Constable portrays a broader expanse, as in his “Wiverhoo Park, Essex” wherein is presented a complex balance of shapes: clouds, cows, shadows, trees and water, the flat of the water set off against the slope of a hill. The relationships are more important than the experience of space while British landscapes other than Constable focus on the atmosphere, how things look through a haze, than with the nature of distance. A case in point, from the end of the Nineteenth Century, is Sir Alfred East, whose “Midland Meadows” shows the play of shadows and the thickness of the air. That makes all the more remarkable Turner’s break into displaying fire and fireworks as his objects of attention rather than the warships that produced them and, later on, Whistler’s full hearted presentation of the geometric shapes of bridges presented, as he saw them, in unusual colors.
To clinch the case for the distinctiveness of American art consisting of the theme of heroism and the artistic technique of openness, consider John Quidor’s 1828 painting, “Rip Van Winkle”, which preceded the Hudson River School and so answers the suggestion that openness was only a quality of that school of American art. Quidor’s portrait of Rip Van Winkle is widely credited with having portrayed its subject as something other than a confused old man. Rather, he is strong and vigorous in his attempt to come to terms with what would doubtlessly be considered an unnerving condition: to have been a time traveller from the origin of the Revolution to a time already very different. He puts up a protest against those who would put him down for being out of the past, confronting his now grown and wastral son and a town elder who shared the past with him. Quidor also allows his picture to show the openness of the Catskill village in which he lives. There is a large open space behind him and the well built houses are far apart from one another, as if this is an architecture different from what would be found in the Lowlands or in London, where houses are close together or places of settlement are clearly differentiated from places on the outskirts of towns. This theme and presentation do not rely on the fact that the United States is indeed a sprawling and spacious continent. Holland we now take to be a very small country but the great Lowland painters rendered its vistas as spacious. Van Ruisdahl’s “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Ground” looks at the expanse of land between the suburban home in the front of the painting and the steepled town in the background. Moreover, it is not that Americans do not consider the alternative hypothesis. Photographs of the Lower East Side at the turn into the Twentieth Century show how crowded are the streets and this presents a contrast to “the sea of grass” that is to the West. It took a very long time, past the Second World War, I think, for Americans to come to realize that the cities were the nature of the country rather than the small town or the village. So the theme and the visual effect are there even if Quidor may seem an inferior painter because he uses too many lines to create his effects, and so does not generate a distinctive artistic achievement but only another application of theme and what seems an inevitable vision.
The theme of the hero may account for another feature of American culture: its anti-intellectualism. While America produced many writers and thinkers worthy of the name, such as Dewey and Pierce, and, before that, Thoreau and Emerson, these people are only heroic by an extension of that word to deeds of the mind, done while sitting on a porch or in a study, not the outdoors kind that befits a real hero. They are an imposition on what is already established as the basic culture of conquest and hardiness, as that is established by the person of George Washington, tall, soldierly, land surveyor, while Franklin, the languishing sybriate, was a much more comic figure. So just as the city has to find its place within the country, so the intellectual has to find a place amidst the earnest and stoic heroes who make up the “natural” American pantheon.