Another favorable symptom among us is, that the people themselves, and leading minds in particular, are becoming more inspired with a taste for noble art. This is indispensable to the production of great and worthy national monuments. Had Pericles, and Augustus, and Leo X. not been as familiar with the principles and usefulness of art as any of those that were around them, and had not the artists of their day not been gentlemen in feeling and accomplishments, the monumental arts of their respective ages would never have risen to the elevation with which they are marked. As soon as our countrymen are once thoroughly convinced of the direction in which the true future of the arts lies, the grandest victory will already have been more than half gained. They will then become thoroughly convinced how utterly unworthy of this country and age were the arts both of the ancient Pagans and those of the middle ages; and producers will not help feeling the degradation inherent in their present servile copying. Men of a higher class of intellect, emancipated from hereditary conventionalism, will devote a more earnest search after excellence, and will find it in the greatest purity and profusion, not where it has so long been sought, but in some new and loftier sphere, where the virgin ore is still concealed in its original matrix. This, however, is not to be rapidly attained. To accomplish any thing really great requires centuries of years and myriads of progressive steps. Unartistic millionaires will cease to inhabit absurd houses, or worship in sham temples, as soon as the mass of the people who long since rebelled against tyrannical and absurd laws, shall come to be as appreciative of architectural improvement as they are sagacious and patriotic to promote popular rights. No longer content to fill new States with dried specimens of old civilizations, a generation is about to appear who will cease erecting edifices which are mere monuments of servile ignorance, and will assure posterity that they dared to think for themselves, and had an art of their own. Not one source of pure and lofty inspiration ever existed which does not now exist; on the contrary, many are now extant which former ages had no suspicion of, and it is painful to see them unused for the noble purposes they were given to promote, substituted as they are by mockeries and absurdities which degrade the office of art, and lead the public to suppose that it is an empty bauble, fit only to pander to the grossest sensuality.
True art is not a thing merely to be copied and bartered at such and such a price, but to be studied with affectionate disinterestedness, with reference to the future creation of new styles and higher classes of beauty, and anterior to the sixteenth century artists wrought constantly upon this principle. Then architecture and its correlative arts were cultivated with a single motive and for only one purpose, that of producing the best possible building with the best possible materials that could be commanded, and without ever looking back on preceding works, except to learn how to avoid their defects and excel their beauties. It was an earnest progressive struggle toward perfection, which, after the stormy period requisite to the founding of our free institutions, we must resume and complete in the more tranquil realm of ennobling art. First learning all that has been done, we are to start from that highest point to surpass it; this has been the process executed by all progressive races, and hence their success. Well might Greece exult in the result of her great battle for freedom; well might each separate state pride itself on the share it had borne in the common struggle, and well might she tax monumental art to give the loftiest expression to her triumphant joy. Kindled with a deep and universal enthusiasm, art was then the reflex of victory, as it is now its noblest monument, and such may it increasingly become in America!
Sculpture, the severest of artistic creations, has already achieved a grand success in our western world. Early success and present proficiency guaranty future excellence of the highest order in this department of the liberal arts. Horatio Greenough of Boston was the first of our countrymen who won a wide reputation in sculpture, and has left works which justify the exalted encomiums he so zealously earned. Hiram Powers soon followed in this serene sphere of genius, and having journeyed unknown from the bosom of the Green Mountains to the "Queen City of the West," he began an artistic career on the banks of the Ohio which has since for many years brightened the fairest glories that gleam in the mirror of the Arno. Clevenger, that noble and magnificent son of the West, was quickened into a generous emulation by Powers, as the latter had been fostered by the kindness of Greenough, and soon the three were harmoniously working together in Florence. Two prime luminaries have been withdrawn from that brilliant constellation to shine in a brighter firmament, but others of not less promise have been added to the sublunary galaxy in rapid succession, so that our sculpturesque school is now second to none extant.
The State which gave birth to our oldest living sculptor abounds more copiously in fine marble than Italy itself; and the statuary, as well as the architect, will yet derive thence the material of his grandest works. The far West is equally rich in the components of bronze, and the more precious metals. At the moment of the present writing, a native artist is erecting in the centre of this city an equestrian statue of Washington of colossal size, which was cast in Massachusetts with a completeness and perfection, it is said, unattainable at any foundry in Europe. It was fitting that the first great leader in this department of national renown should execute his masterpieces for the republic and its metropolis, and that his worthy successors should now be adorning the capitals of the remotest parent colonies with masterly memorials in both marble and bronze. Patriotic hearts can not but be thrilled in observing how in every section of our country spacious studios are devoted to high art, whence busts, portrait-statues, and original groups are elicited by constantly-increased patronage, to adorn private mansions and ennoble the popular taste. Clevenger, when an humble apprentice to a stone-mason in Cincinnati, made his first attempt at sculpture by the light of a midnight moon over the bas-relief of a tombstone; and the first full-length monumental figure cut for "Mount Auburn" was executed by an adventurer in Boston, whom we first knew as a poor country blacksmith, but who is now an eminent and wealthy sculptor. The old world has no cemeteries which in natural beauty and adaptedness to artificial adornment can compare with our own, and these rural cities of the dead will soon become grand repositories of living art. Already is this foreshadowed at Greenwood, around the granite pedestal whereon the yet more enduring majesty of De Witt Clinton looks abroad on the fleeting grandeurs of earth, ocean, and sky. Niches and arcades are opened in all public buildings of recent erection, and good sculpture is rapidly becoming an exquisite delight to the American mind.
So long as the aim of the sculptor is only to advance step by step toward the ideal of perfect beauty, no age can ever excel that of Pericles. The limited powers of mortals are incapable of advancing further in that direction than paganism attained in giving to corporeal charms a material expression. But the age of Washington is called to embody intellectual beauty, invested with such feelings as the highest class of Christian development will admit of, and this will enable the modern artist to reach a far higher point of excellence than has yet been attained. The same subsidiary vehicle must be employed to convey a more exalted class of expression, but a nobler aim is opened to the consecrated aspirant, and superlative excellence in sculpture must be the result. Of their kind, the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de' Medici will ever stand without rivals; but they do not belong to the highest class of art, for the Venus has no more mind than the Greeks usually ascribed to women; and the Apollo, though the noblest animal ever created, is no more in the realm of intellect than "a young Mohawk." Sculpture is not always to remain only an unmeaning transcript of an extinct system of art, but must advance beyond the expression of mere corporeal beauty. What is now most wanted for this, as for all kindred arts, is the power of expressing the loftiest order of intellect, blended with the most refined sensibility which either the heart of sculptured genius can conceive or its hand execute. We believe that capacities adequate to the accomplishment of this consummate end will yet be developed in America, and are convinced that their happy exercise will lead to triumphs of art higher than ever the Grecians, in their hour of most magnificent exaltation, dreamed of. The fine arts of the ancients were only necessary results of their general system, and of the objects they sought through every channel and in every thought; as our ships and engines are not things apart from our commerce or manufactures, but only great facts resulting from them as exponents the most exact. But in due time Americans will elaborate beauty out of the practical arts as earnestly as they now look for profit in them, and then will the world witness the coalescence of the human and divine in sculptured worth the most complete.
Painting was the first fine art cultivated in America, and has never ceased to advance. When George Berkeley came to this country with the benevolent purpose of opening a university for the education of the aborigines, he included the arts of design in his system of education. No founder of schools in the old world ever thought of that. Berkeley had traveled in Italy with a Scotch artist, John Smybert, and chose him to be professor of architecture, drawing, and painting in his projected institution. There is at Yale College a large picture which represents Berkeley and some of his family, together with the artist himself, on their first landing in America, which is supposed to be the first picture of more than a single figure ever painted on our shores.
Berkeley's general scheme was abandoned from necessity, but Smybert settled in Boston, where he married and died. The latter event occurred in 1751, when his pupil, Copley, was but thirteen years old. Trumbull retired from the army, and resumed painting in Boston, in 1777, surrounded by Copley's works, and in the room which had been built for Smybert. Thus was the path of progress opened and increasingly glorified, the greatest of New England colorists, Allston, having first caught the reflection of Vandyke in Smybert. All the best portraits which remain of eminent divines and magistrates of the eastern States and New York, who lived between 1725 and 1751, are from the pencil of this founder of pictorial art in America.
In his "History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States," William Dunlap commemorates more than four hundred and thirty painters who have contributed to the establishment of an American school of art. It is really wonderful that so much artistic merit should have been matured in the midst of difficulties incident to the civilization of a barbarous continent. But Sir Walter Scott, in recommending a work of American genius to Maria Edgeworth, sagaciously accounted for the phenomenon by saying, "That people once possessed of a three-legged stool, soon contrive to make an easy-chair." In allusion to this anecdote, our first great sculptor, Greenough, remarks, "Humble as the phrase is, we here perceive an expectation on his part, that the energies now exercised in laying the foundations of a mighty empire, would, in due time, rear the stately columns of civilization, and crown the edifice with the entablature of letters and of arts. Remembering that one leg of the American stool was planted in Maine, a second in Florida, and the third at the base of the Rocky Mountains, he could scarce expect that the chair would become an easy one in half a century. It is true, that before the Declaration of Independence, Copley had in Boston formed a style of portrait which filled Sir Joshua Reynolds with astonishment; and that West, breaking through the bar of Quaker prohibition, and conquering the prejudice against a provincial aspirant, had taken a high rank in the highest walk of art in London. Stuart, Trumbull, Allston, Morse, Leslie, and Newton, followed in quick succession, while Vanderlyn won golden opinions at Rome, and bore away high honors at Paris. So far were the citizens of the republic from showing a want of capacity for art, that we may safely affirm the bent of their genius was rather peculiarly in that direction, since the first burins of Europe were employed in the service of the American pencil before Irving had written, and while Cooper was yet a child. That England, with these facts before her, should have accused us of obtuseness in regard to art, and that we should have pleaded guilty to the charge, furnishes the strongest proof of her disposition to underrate our intellectual powers, and of our own ultra docility and want of self-reliance."
No Walhalla can be made to start suddenly from a republican soil; but we firmly believe that our free institutions are more favorable to a natural, healthful growth of art, than any hot-bed culture under the auspices of aristocrats or kings. Monuments, statues, and pictures which represent what the people love and wish for are rapidly multiplied, and this popular appreciation of high art needs only to be guided by salutary examples to become mighty and prolific beyond any preceding age.
No country ever existed where the development and growth of an artist was more free, healthful, and happy, than it is in these United States. Independence of character is essential to all eminent success, and that is here necessitated by every law of life. Like Alexander, when he embarked for Asia; Cæsar, when he leaped the Rubicon; Phidias, when he adorned the Parthenon; Michael Angelo, when he painted the Capella Sistina; Raphael, when he entered the Vatican; Napoleon, when he invaded Italy; and Columbus, when he sailed for America; the aspirant after exalted art-excellence in our land, must depend mainly on his own genius, and find in that his best patron and reward.