American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Chester Harding, reared on the New York frontier, a typical back-woodsman, by turns a peddler, a tavern-keeper, and house-painter, and a failure at all of them, got so deeply in debt that he ran away to Pittsburgh to escape his creditors, and there, to his amazement, one day saw an itinerant painter painting a portrait. Before that, he had secured work of some sort, and his wife had joined him. Filled with admiration for the artist's work, he procured a board and some paint, and sat down to paint a portrait of his wife. He actually did produce a likeness, and, delighted at the result, practiced a while longer, and then, proceeding to Paris, Kentucky—perhaps through some association of the name with the great art centre of Europe—boldly announced himself as a portrait painter, and got about a hundred people to pay him twenty-five dollars apiece to paint them.

He spent some time at Cincinnati, and got as far west as St. Louis, where he journeyed nearly a hundred miles to find Daniel Boone living in his log cabin on his Missouri land, and painted the portrait of that old pioneer which is reproduced in "Men of Action." Boone was at that time ninety years of age, and Harding found him living almost alone, roasting a piece of venison on the end of his ramrod, as had been his custom all his life.

One of the most surprising things in the history of American art is the facility with which men of all trades turned to portrait painting, apparently as a last resort, and managed to make a living at it. During the first half of the last century, the country seems to have been overrun with wandering portrait painters, whose only equipment for the art was some paint and a bundle of brushes. They had, for the most part, no training, and that anyone, in a time when money was scarce and hardly earned, should have paid it out for the wretched daubs these men produced is a great mystery. But they did pay it out, and, as we have seen, Harding earned no less than twenty-five hundred dollars in a comparatively short time.

With such of this money as he had been able to save, he went to Philadelphia and spent two months in study there; then he returned to his old home, and astonished his neighbors by paying his debts. He astonished them still more when they found he was making money by painting portraits, for which he now charged forty dollars each, and his aged grandfather felt obliged to protest.

"Chester," he said, having called him aside so that none could overhear, "I want to speak to you about your present mode of life. I think it no better than swindling to charge forty dollars for one of those effigies. Now I want you to give up this way of living and settle down on a farm and become a respectable man."

However excellent this advice may have been, Chester had gone too far to heed it. He had decided to go to England, but he stayed in America long enough to earn money to buy a farm for his parents and to settle his own family at Northampton. This duty accomplished, he set sail for London, and his success there was immediate, due as much to his remarkable personality as to his work. He returned to America in 1826, and spent the rest of his life here, painting most of the political leaders of the country. It has been said of his portraits that his heads are as solid as iron and his coats as uncompromising as tin, while his faces shine like burnished platters.

Remarkable as Harding's story is, it is no more so than that of many of his contemporaries. Francis Alexander, for instance, born in Connecticut in 1800, a farm boy and afterwards a school teacher, never attempted painting until he was over twenty. Then one day, having caught a pickerel, its beauty reminded him of a box of water-colors a boy had left him, and he attempted to paint the fish, with such success that he was filled with amazement and delight. He practiced a while longer, decorating the white-washed walls of a room with rude landscapes filled with cattle, horses, sheep, hogs and chickens. All the neighbors came to see his work and marvelled at it, though none of them cared to have his house similarly decorated; but finally one of them offered Alexander five dollars if he would paint a full-length portrait of a child.

Other orders followed, and finally with sixty dollars in his pocket, he started for New York. Some years later, he sought Gilbert Stuart, at Boston, got some systematic instruction and ended by painting very passable portraits.

Some amusing stories are told of the persistency with which he hunted for orders. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited America for the first time, and while his ship was yet out of sight of land, the pilot clambered on board, and after him Alexander, who begged the great novelist for the privilege of painting his portrait. Dickens, amused at his enterprise, consented, and Alexander's studio, during the sittings, became the centre of literary Boston. It is a curious commentary upon Alexander's development that, after a trip or two abroad, he professed to find the crudities of his native land unbearable, and spent his last years in Italy.

A third self-made artist was John Neagle, whose portrait of Gilbert Stuart, which heads this chapter, is the best that exists. Neagle was apprenticed, when a boy, to a coach-painter, and soon was spending his spare time practicing a more ambitious branch of the painting profession. As soon as he was through his apprenticeship he set up as a portrait painter, and travelled over the mountains to Lexington, Kentucky, hoping to fare as well as Harding had. But he found the field already pre-empted by two other painters, one of whom, Matthew Jouett, was an artist of considerable skill.