The Revolutionary War of Independence, Art and Architecture

Man, it was held, was integrally good only had been corrupted by flawed institutions. In contrast to the turpitude of the absolutist monarchies of Europe the classical sometime(prenominal) was held to embody humanity's index to create ideal societies. The improvement of humanity inherent in this clear was one of the forces behind the eventual revolutions in the States and France. When the new American system was inaugurated it was held to incorporate a " gritty regard for man's spring and for man's capacity through the exercise of reason to create a better world" and a peculiar(prenominal) "vision of antiquity," based largely on wishful thinking, was the " ideal of that world" (Prown 205).

The Federalist neoclassical style responded to all three of the problems approach by American art. Its classical shapes and motifs and its spare, cool lines and surfaces deliberately rebuked the embroidery that characterized the royal courts of Europe. But it also reached beyond Versailles to a historical past that grounded Americans in history but denied any inherent connection to the corruptions of the intervening systems. In moral terms the crochet and geometrical attributes of Neoclassical design "are assertions of the dominion of encephalon" over the baser pleasures of the senses perceived by John Adams and many Americans as residing in the sen

Novak, Barbara. American scene of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Praeger, 1969.

Wilmerding, John. American Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Flexner, John Thomas. History of American Painting: The Light of Distant Skies (1760-1835). New York: Harcourt, 1954. New York: Dover, 1969.

The superpower of these works to suggest the nature of America's destiny also bestow them a kind of moral standing that did not desire on the allegorizing found in earlier works such as Thomas Coles' famous paintings. For all the wonder expressed in such works over the variety and fullness of America there was less of the universal in them than there was of the specific destiny of one particular nation at one moment in history. Americans were far less assiduous with the past than European artists were. And in having so little past to look back to Americans possessed an "unfettered curiosity [that] sharpen[ed] the view of both reality and the symbolic meanings of art" (Morgan 62). This unique land site was reflected in the American approach to portraiture in which, European critics noted, Americans wanted to "depict the character of a sitter, rather than affable status or political role" (Morgan 62).

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